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 ting on her new clothes and going out in her bottle-green town car to buy something for the house—a Coromandel screen, a rose-quartz Kwan-Yin, Goddess of Mercy. It made her happy to feel that through her Curtis's money, that might have been just so many sordid dollars, was being transmuted into beauty, into food for the spirit. And her new preoccupations did not make her thoughtless of others. She bought souvenirs for all the people she had not had time to remember when she was abroad—bags and scarfs for the aunts, an English pipe for Uncle Johnnie, a collar that probably really had come from Paris, for Katie Sullivan. They would never know the difference.

The dinners given in her honor by the Careys' friends were pleasant, but most of the luncheons bored her. Self-centered women, full of their own affairs. And what affairs! What shallow, surface lives they seemed to lead! It wasn't that she minded that they only thought of her as Mrs. Curtis Carey, that most of them didn't know she was Christabel Caine,