more cash and he too would move over to the so-called law side, like those heirs of rackets of a hundred years ago. Providing of course some hophead didn't bump him off first. He had set up the Club for elite clients who didn't want to mix with no-class guys from anywheres who turned up in even the classiest Broadway speakeasies "sent by Joe." In the Chennonceaux the ubiquitous Joe had no in. Nominally a supper-dance club open to the public, the maitre d'hotel, a bona fide Prince, one of the legion of noble Russian émigrés, and the doorman, a bona fide Count who had been a Captain in the late Czar's army, knew how to size up and give the boot to outsiders.
But though Piselli considered the Chennonceaux the ladder to his respectability, his "socially-up" older Club members, particularly the women to whom heretofore night life had meant opera, theatre, dining at the Colony or one of three hotels, regarded his Club as a delightfully thrilling descent into an offbounds world which suddenly it was permissible to enjoy with the other new modes: comfortable girdles, bobbed hair, and smoking in public. What made this new night club additionally fascinating was that there were always present the queer people of Bohemia and Broadway, writers, painters, and stars. One could talk and dance with them, without becoming involved socially. It wasn't as dull as the opera.
On this night, to enthroned Diane de Poitiers, undoubtedly possessed of an immortal's vision of time's relativity', a somewhat different and older parlor game than the latest one begun by a Mr. Einstein, the fete below must have appeared a composite of two diverse centuries: a neo-Greco-Roman bacchanale of shorn boylike nymphs in short spangled chitons dancing with men in the 20th century's postwar humdrum uniform of black and white. Especially must Diane have noted a slender dazzling Aphrodite with golden hair lighted as if by a sun within and clad in a diaphanous midnight-blue gown shimmering with a milky way of dew. A twinge of jealousy must have affected Diane for she retreated behind the haze of rose and blue cigarette smoke, a winy glow soon after to be emulated by Broadway scene designers for those revue numbers exposing nudity even a little further than the law allowed and named, appropriately, "Special Lavender."
"Well, I must say the town's turned out for Calvette," Lucy said, surveying the room while deliberately avoiding the reproachful
