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 had promised to attend a party at Hester Albright's, a prospect which aroused in her no anticipations of pleasure. Hester, a spinster of thirty-eight, lived with her mother, a deaf, querulous, garrulous, tiresome, old lady, on the fourth floor of an apartment building on St. Nicholas Avenue. They had migrated from Washington to Harlem about five years previously. Why, nobody exactly understood, as Washington society, according to Hester, was immeasurably superior to the Harlem variety. She was in the habit, indeed, of making invidious comparisons, the more mysterious when one considered that the Albrights apparently were sufficiently well off to live comfortably wherever they might choose. As a matter of fact, living expenses in Harlem were higher than in the national capital. I think, Olive had once remarked, that it amuses them to live here so they can tell us how awful we are. . . . If Hester and her mother looked down on Harlem, they did not enjoy a similar privilege with Brooklyn. The Brooklyn set ignored their very existence.

Hester was plain, far too plain to receive masculine attentions, but vain enough to conceive herself as irresistible. A thorough prig, she was easily shocked. She was, moreover, extremely critical, not only of others' actions but also of their very thoughts. She cherished her own idiosyncratic ideas about propriety, propriety in art, in dressing, in general conduct. She particularly assumed an aggressive and antagonistic attitude towards the new lit-