"
"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.
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