“Were they giving them away with a pound of tea?”

“Honest, Kitty, it was neat.  Little white shirt waist, tan shoes, and one of those slick little five-dollar sailors, and every cent paid out of my salary.  I could step into that outfit to-morrow, look the part, and land back that job or any other.  I had a way with the trade, even back at Finley’s.”

“Here, hold my jewel bag, honey; I’m going to die of cold-cream suffocation if she don’t soon come back and unsmear me.”

“Opal beetle in it?”

“Yes, dearie; but it won’t bite.  It’s muzzled with my diamond horseshoe.”

“Nothing doing, Kit.  Put it under your pillow.”

“You better watch out.  There’s a thirteenth letter in the alphabet; you might accidentally use it some day.  You’re going to have a sweet time to-night, you are!”

“Why?”

“The boys have engaged De Butera to come up to the rooms.”

“You mean the fortune teller over at the Stag Hotel?”

“She’s not a fortune teller, you poor nervous wreck.  She’s the highest-priced spiritualist in the world.  Moving tables—­spooks—­woof!”

“Faugh!” said Hester, rising from her couch and feeling with her little bare feet for the daintiest of pink-silk mules.  “I could make tables move, too, at forty dollars an hour.  Where’s my attendant?  I want an alcohol rub.”

They did hold seance that night in a fine spirit of lark, huddled together in the de-luxe sitting room of one of their suites, and little half-hysterical shrieks and much promiscuous ribaldry under cover of darkness.

Madame de Butera was of a distinctly fat and earthy blondness, with a 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.