coarse-lace waist over pink, and short hands covered with turquoise
rings of many shapes and blues.

Tables moved. A dead sister of Wheeler's spoke in thin, high voice. Why
is it the dead are always so vocally thin and high?

A chair tilted itself on hind legs, eliciting squeals from the women.
Babe spoke with a gentleman friend long since passed on, and Kitty with
a deceased husband, and began to cry quite sobbily and took little sips
of highball quite gulpily. May Denison, who was openly defiant, allowed
herself to be hypnotized and lay rigid between two chairs, and
Kitty went off into rampant hysteria until Wheeler finally placed a
hundred-dollar bill over the closed eyes, and whether under it, or to
the legerdemain of madam's manipulating hands, the tight eyes opened,
May, amid riots of laughter, claiming for herself the hundred-dollar
bill, and Kitty, quite resuscitated, jumping up for a table cancan, her
yellow hair tumbling, and her china-blue eyes with the dregs in them
inclined to water.

All but Hester. She sat off by herself in a peacock-colored gown that
wrapped her body suavity as if the fabric were soaking wet, a band of
smoky-blue about her forehead. Never intoxicated, a slight amount of
alcohol had a tendency to make her morose.

"What's the matter, Cleo?" asked Wheeler, sitting down beside her and
lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote
analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen.
"What's the matter Cleo? Does the spook stuff get your goat?"

She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up, like waters suddenly