n wardrobe trunks sent by express.

They took the "cure." Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the
casino for big stakes, and scorned the American plan of service for the
smarter European idea, with a special _a la carte_ menu for each meal.
Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, strictly against the mandates of
the "cure," appeared at their table. Strange midnight goings-on were
reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their
circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty
ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver spots on their faces. The bath
attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season. When Hester walked
down the large dining room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of
necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette. The kinds of
toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the
underarm was cut, and the men into covert delight. Wheeler liked to sit
back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.

"Make 'em sit up, girl! You got them all looking like dimes around
here."

One night she descended to the dining room in a black evening gown so
daringly lacking in back, and yet, withal, so slimly perfect an elegant
thing, that an actual breathlessness hung over the hall, the clatter of
dishes pausing.

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. "I don't want to
be seen running with her."

"Did you see the square