“Now, my dear, I’ve taken care of all the preparations… you won’t have to bother your lovely head about a single thing, outside of being attentive to the attentive and important gentlemen who attend the affair,” said the effete and pretentious Mrs. Elspeth Thomaston, languidly applying her soignй and jeweled hand to her coiffure, fresh from the salon of Madame Dubonnet off Fifth Avenue.

“Very well, Mother; but I’m sure I’ll be bored to tears, really,” responded her eighteen-year-old daughter Marcia, reclining indolently on a chaise lounge, her eyes flitting over the pages of a new Faith Baldwin novel, a box of imported chocolates beside her at a taboret. Nor did she gaze up from her perusal of the saccharine tome to notice her mother’s shallow smile and leave-taking.

For well aware was this aristocratic and inordinately egotistical young offspring of one of New York’s most elite families that she was the center of attraction; that her debut was scheduled-as one of the season’s most elaborate and expensive affairs-for the following night.

Beautiful, snobbish, undisciplined and affected to an irritating degree, Marcia intended to remain the center of attraction as long as. her attributes of beauty remained to her.

And she was beautiful-that might truly be said of her.

Brunette, with hair as black as her perfect and well-cared-for skin was ivory white, tall, svelte, magnificently proportioned, with breasts as full, as firm and as delectably molded as ripe pears, with sleek hips that proclaimed her superbly suited to the rites of love, with long, lissome and resilient thighs whose appetizing columns never failed to draw the admiration of male eyes when she entered the swankiest of nightclubs invariably gowned in dazzling red or black satin that sheathed her almost to the point of lewdness, with low-cut back and bosom and naked and flawlessly sculptured slender arms which she delighted in sheathing with expensive and incredibly thin black suede gloves to her elbows.