“Make ’em sit up, girl!  You got them all looking like dimes around here.”

One night she descended to the dining room in a black evening gown so daringly lacking in back, and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant thing, that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of dishes pausing.

There was a gold bird of paradise dipped down her hair over one shoulder, trailing its smoothness like fingers of lace.  She defied with it as she walked.

“Take it from me,” said Kitty, who felt fat in lavender that night, “she’s going it one too strong.”

Another evening she descended, always last, in a cloth of silver with a tiny, an absurd, an impeccably tight silver turban dipped down over one eye, and absolutely devoid of jewels except the pear-shaped diamond on her left forefinger.

They were a noisy, a spending, a cosmopolitan crowd of too-well-fed men and too-well-groomed women, ignored by the veranda groups of wives and mothers, openly dazzling and arousing a tremendous curiosity in the younger set, and quite obviously sought after by their own kind.

But Hester’s world, too, is all run through with sharply defined social schisms.

“I wish that Irwin woman wouldn’t always hang round our crowd,” she said, one morning, as she and Kitty lay side by side in the cooling room after their baths, massages, manicures, and shampoos.  “I don’t want to be seen running with her.”

“Did you see the square emerald she wore last night?”

“Fake.  I know the clerk at the Synthetic Jewelry Company had it made up for her.  She’s cheap, I tell you.  Promiscuous.  Who ever heard of anybody standing back of her?  She knocks around.  She sells her old clothes to Tessie, my manicurist.  I’ve got a line on her.  She’s cheap.”

Kitty, who lay with her face under a white mud of cold cream and her little mouth merely a hole, turned on her elbow.

“We can’t all be top-notchers, Hester,” she said.  “You’re hard as nails.”

“I guess I am, but you’ve got to be to play this game.  The ones who aren’t end up by stuffing the keyhole and turning on the gas.  You’ve got to play it hard or not at all.  If you’ve got the name, you might as well have the game.”

“If I had it to do over again—­well, there would be one more wife-and-mother role being played in this little old world, even if I had to play it on a South Dakota farm.”

“‘Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well,’ I used to write in a copy book.  Well, that’s the way I feel about this.  To me, anything is worth doing to escape the cotton stockings and lisle next to your skin.  I admit I never sit down and think.  You know, sit down and take stock of myself.  What’s the use thinking?  Live!  Yes,” mused Hester, her arms in a wreath over her head, “I think I’d do it all over again.  There’s not been so many, at that.  Three.  The first was a salesman.  He’d have married me, but I couldn’t see it on six thousand a year.  Nice fellow, too—­an easy spender in a small way, but I couldn’t see a future to ladies’ neckwear.  I hear he made good later in munitions.  Al was a pretty good sort, too, but tight.  How I hate tightness!  I’ve been pretty lucky in the long run, I guess.”