n 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.

"What's the matter, Cleo?" asked Wheeler, sitting down beside he