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.
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