up to the deception, though intending to ask her for the answer at my earliest convenience.
William worked fast and managed to make a dinner engagement with us for the following night—not a difficult feat. Almost immediately afterwards he bowed out, carelessly remarking that he must hasten away to cable his brokers "regarding a million dollar deal" he was negotiating in the rue Wall, New York. As William airily made this announcement, the hypnotized Hazel, who hates money the same way J. P. Morgan dislikes a ticker, looked at him swooningly. But really, as I've met two hundred thousand of these boys at the St. Moe switchboard whose patter is the same as William's, I regarded his vanishing shapely back through narrowed eyes and began to get thoughtful. Oh, lots thoughtful!
In the privacy of our boudoir that night, Hazel furnished me with a complete inventory of William Richardson Van Cleve II. From Hazel's prejudiced viewpoint, Bill was something more than the feline's haberdashery and she had stumbled across him under double romantic—almost movie—circumstances. While shopping in one of Monsieur Rue's cute little alleys, she had mislaid her sense of direction, and her inability to talk any more Paris than a rabbit had made her predicament real serious. As if that wasn't more than ample to drive our heroine to distraction, along came
