for Jim's breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking
bugs off the potato vines.

Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He
owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented
bottle-stopper. He's a pavement contractor. His wife has just as
much leisure as any duchess.

The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it
possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her
own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Downtown District,
cooeperatively owned, cooeperatively maintained, magnificently
equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest rooms of the department
stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and
pay no more attention to the florist than to one's own gardener,
with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St.
DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty shops, with coachmen on
the taxicabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the
Novellapolis Athletic Club--an infinitely resourceful estate, which
Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.

This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth
floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel
scales. After an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company
light therapy, she weighed out at 182-6.

At luncheon she ate only puree of tomatoes, creamed chicken and
sweetbreads, Boston bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore
cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.

After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all
around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any
duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It
ended up with: "Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and
dieting I've been doing I can't wear under a twenty-seven? It's
ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These
stock sizes all run large. If it's made to order I can wear a
twenty-six as easy as anybody."

Then she met up with her friends at the St. DuBarry.

You watch the waiter bring another round of drinks and you perceive
that the evening is well under way and that the peak of the
twenty-four hours is being disputatiously approached.

It appears that Perinique's is a swell place to dine, but that the
cheese is bad. The cheese is good right here at the St. DuBarry, but
they don't know how to toast the biscuits. At the Gruenewurst the
wait