While Hester was living this tale, and the chinchilla coat was
enveloping her like an ineffably tender caress, three hundred thousand
of her country's youths were at strangle hold across three thousand
miles of sea, and on a notorious night when Hester walked, fully dressed
in a green gown of iridescent fish scales, into the electric fountain of
a seaside cabaret, and Wheeler had to carry her to her car wrapped in a
sable rug, Gerald Fishback was lying with his face in Flanders mud, and
his eye sockets blackly deep and full of shrapnel, and a lung-eating gas
cloud rolling at him across the vast bombarded dawn.

* * * * *

Hester read of him one morning, sitting up in bed against a mound of
lace-over-pink pillows, a masseuse at the pink soles of her feet. It was
as if his name catapulted at her from a column she never troubled to
read. She remained quite still, looking at the name for a full five
minutes after it had pierced her full consciousness. Then, suddenly, she
swung out of bed, tilting over the masseuse.

"Tessie," she said, evenly enough, "that will do. I have to hurry to
Long Island to a base hospital. Go to that little telephone in the
hall--will you?--and call my car."

But the visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red
tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside
hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been
the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy.

She thought she would faint when she saw him, jerking herself back with