closed, "I'm really not a Bluebeard. See you this evening."

Dink Gerding, wearing an ordinary enough suit, well-cut, expensive, but nothing extraordinary for a banker, called for Orison at seven. He'd look well, she thought, slipping into the coat he held for her, in a white uniform brocaded with pounds of spun gold, broad epaulettes, a stiff bank of extravagantly-colored ribbons across his chest; perhaps resting his right hand on the pommel of a dress saber. "Dink," she asked him, "were you ever in the Army?"

"You might say I'm still in an army," he said, turning and smiling down at her from that arrogant posture of his. "I'm a corporal in the army of the gainfully employed; an army where there's little glamor but better pay than in the parades-and-battles sort. What makes you ask, Orison?"

"Because of the way you stand and walk, Dink," she said. "Like an Infantry captain from Texas."

"I'm flattered," Dink Gerding said, holding open the lobby door for her. "The car's just around the corner."

"I met your brother, Kraft, earlier today, just before he and the Earmuffs caught me up on eighth floor," Orison said. "He's no Texan, that one. A Junker, maybe. I'm afraid I don't much care for your brother, Dink."

"To be my elder brother is Kraft's special misfortune," Dink said. "I understand he was quite loveable as a boy. Here's our transportation."

The car was a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, splendidly conspicuous beside the curb of the Windsor Arms, reducing that nobly-named establishment by contrast to more democratic proportions. The ubiquitous Mr. Wanji, liveried in a uniform nearly as ornate as the one Orison had visualized for Dink, only his earmuffs clashing with the magnificence of his costume, sprang from the driver's seat, raced around the limousine and stood at attention holding the door for Orison and her escort. The front door of the Rolls was marked, she observed, with a gold device of three coronets. At the center of the triangle they formed was the single letter "D."

The Rolls negotiated the city streets with the dignity of the Queen Elizabeth entering a minor harbor. "I thought you bankers aspired to the common touch," Orison remarked. "I expected you to come for me in a taxi, or perhaps a year-old Ford you drove yourself."

"Wanji is a better driver than I. So I have him drive me," Dink explained. "We each do the work 

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