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 high-ball 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 her and lifting her cool fingers one by one, and, by reason of some remote analogy that must have stirred within him, seeing in her a Nile queen. “What’s the matter, Cleo; does the spook-stuff get your goat?” She turned on him eyes that were all troubled up like waters suddenly wind-blown. “God!” she said, her fingers, nails inward, closing about his arm. “Wheeler--can--can the--dead--speak?” But fleeting as the hours themselves were the moods of them all, and the following morning there they were, the eight of them, light with laughter and caparisoned again as to hampers, veils, coats, dogs, off for a day’s motoring through the springtime countryside. “Where to?” shouted Wheeler, twisting from where he and Hester sat in the first of the cars to call to the two motor-loads behind. “I thought Crystal Cave was the spot”--from May Denison in the last of the cars, winding her head in a scarlet veil. “Crystal Springs it is, then.” “Is that through Demopolis?” Followed a scanning of maps. “Sure! Here it is! See! Granite City. Mitchell. Demopolis. Crystal Cave.” “Good Lord, Hester, you’re not going to spend any time in that dump?” “It’s my home town,” she replied coldly. “The only relation I had is buried there. It’s nothing out of your way to drop me on the court-house steps and pick me up as you drive back. I’ve been wanting to get there ever since we’re down here. Wanting to stop by your home town you haven’t seen in five years isn’t unreasonable, is it?” He admitted it wasn’t, leaning to kiss her. She turned to him a face, soft, with one of the pouts he usually found irresistible. “Honey,” she said, “what do you think?” “What?” “Chris is buying May that chinchilla coat I showed you in Meyerbloom’s window the day before we left.” “The deuce he is!” he said, letting go of her hand but hers immediately covering his.