“Wonderful girl, isn’t she?” asked Kate.
“She sure is.”
“Her mother,” said Kate, “had more wit than any other woman in San Francisco—and the men she had!”
“I think Eleanor has inherited that at any rate,” she added after a pause.
They had reached the door of the Marionette Theatre now. Afterward they drank beer at Norman’s; and when they broke up, Bertram Chester found himself with three invitations to call.
Kate Waddington spent that night with Eleanor Gray in the Tiffany House on Russian Hill. While they sat before the fireplace, in the half-hour of loosened hair and confidences, Eleanor broke a minute of silence with the inquiry:
“What did you think of him?” An instant 96 after she let slip this impersonal inquiry, she would have given gold to recall it. And if she had any hope that Kate Waddington had missed the point, it died in her when Kate answered in an indifferent tone:
“He? Oh, he seems to me to be a little promiscuous.”