Sinfully Rich by Hulbert Footner — Read

Mrs. Charles Warrington Ware occupied a triplex apartment at the top of the most expensive building on the Avenue. Bethesda had leased it for her. Two walls of the vast living room were painted white and the other two black, thus immediately establishing a modernistic atmosphere. Down at one end was an arrangement of primitive African sculpture--very primitive; other decorations included big wooden bowls of colored glass balls placed here and there on the floor; modernistic sculptured animals on stands and surrealist paintings on the walls. In the beginning Mrs. Ware had felt obliged to avert her eyes from the primitive sculpture and the surrealists, but she became accustomed to them in time, and all her sophisticated friends agreed with Bethesda, that the whole effect was _très-chi-chi_.

At nine o'clock on the morning following the over-publicized hay ride, Miss Day Radnor rang the bell of the apartment as usual, and was admitted by Cummings, the butler. Brown-haired Miss Radnor, who favored severely tailored suits and hats as if she was determined to hide how pretty she was (but only thereby emphasized it), looked a little out of place among the grotesques, but she worked there. She said: "Weren't you up very late last night, Cummings?"