Somehow, looking into the blueness of his eyes and their entreaty for her affirmative, she did what you or I might have done.  She half lied, regretting it while the words still smoked on her lips.

“Why, yes, Gerald; I’ve held a fine position in Lichtig Brothers, New York importers.  Those places sometimes pay as high as seventy-five a week.  But I don’t make any bones, Gerald; I’ve not been an angel.”

“The—­the salesman, Hester?”—­his lips quivering with a nausea for the question.

“I haven’t seen him in four years,” she answered, truthfully.

He laid his cheek on her hand.

“I knew you’d come through.  It was your environment.  I’ll marry you to-morrow—­to-day, Hester.  I love you.”

“You darling boy!” she said, her lips back tight against her teeth.  “You darling, darling boy!”

“Please, Hester!  We’ll forget what has been.”

“Let me go,” she said, rising and pinning on her hat; “let me go—­or—­or I’ll cry, and—­and I don’t want to cry.”

“Hester,” he called, rushing after her and wanting to fold her back into his arms, “let me prove my trust—­my love—­”

“Don’t!  Let me go!  Let me go!”

At slightly after six the ultra cavalcade drew up at the court-house steps.  She was greeted with the pleasantries and the gibes.

“Have a good time, sweetness?” asked Wheeler, arranging her rugs.

“Yes,” she said, lying back and letting her lids droop; “but tired—­very, very tired.”

At the hotel, she stopped a moment to write a telegram before going up for the vapor bath, nap, and massage that were to precede dinner.

“Meyerbloom & Co., Furriers.  Fifth Avenue, New York,” it was addressed.

* * * * *

This is not a war story except that it has to do with profiteering, parlor patriots, and the return of Gerald Fishback.

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.