r for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the
linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or
maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve history would help.

In any event, after an evening of musical comedy and of gelatinous
dancing, Hester awoke at four o'clock the next morning out of an hour of
sound sleep, leaping to her knees there in bed like a quick flame, her
gesture shooting straight up toward the jointure of wall and ceiling.

"Gerald!" she called, her smoky black hair floating around her and her
arms cutting through the room's blackness. "Gerald!" Suddenly the room
was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald,
the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her
dressing table, and, more than that, the drained lakes of his sockets
were deep with eyes. Yes, in all their amazing blueness, but queerly
sharpened to steel points that went through Hester and through her as if
bayonets were pushing into her breasts and her breathing.

"Gerald!" she shrieked, in one more cry that curdled the quiet, and sat
up in bed, trembling and hugging herself, and breathing in until her
lips were drawn shudderingly against her teeth like wind-sucked window
shades.

"Gerald!" And then the picture did a sort of moving-picture fade-out,
and black Lottie came running with her hair grotesquely greased and
flattened to take out the kink, and gave her a drink of water with the
addition of two drops from a bottle, and turned on the night light and
went back to bed.

The next morning Hester carried about what she called "a head," and,
since it was Wheeler's day at Rosencranz, remained in bed until three
o'clock, Kitty curled at the foot of it the greater part of the
forenoon.

"It was the rotten night did me up. Dreams! Ugh! dreams!"

"No wonder," diagnosed Kitty, sweetly. "Indigestion from having your
cake and eating it."

At three she dressed and called for her car, driving down to the Ivy
Funeral Rooms, a Gothic Thanatopsis, set, with one of those laughs up
her sleeves in which the vertical city so loves to indulge, right in
the heart of the town, between an automobile-accessory shop and a
quick-lunch room. Gerald had been buried from there with simple
flag-draped service in the Gothic chapel that was protected from the
view and roar of the Elevated trains by suitably stained windows. There
was a check in Hester's purse made out for an amount that