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into the vast, echoing marble pile on Millionaire’s Row. As his life was already something of a scandal, none of his blue-blooded neighbors did more than cluck and gossip at this latest development. Other than the usual polite society page squib, scant mention was made of the event in the city’s newspapers. The Daily News, first of the sensationalist tabloids, remained three years in the future and, although no less cynical and hard-boiled, journalists in those days exercised a certain sense of decorum.
    Whatever the prurient might have imagined regarding an aging roué ravishing an innocent farm girl, the truth evaded their wildest dreams. Opal was no timid victim. On their wedding night, she stalked Walter Fletcher across his opulent bedchamber like a tigress. Her kisses tore at his lips. Her knowing touch and erotic crooning murmurs suggested much experience, and he thought himself in the arms of a prostitute until he found he had forced a virgin and came away matted with her blood.
    From the very first night, Walter remained Opal’s love slave. In his private moments, he reflected on his long libertine life, thinking it a bit of a chuckle to be so thoroughly besotted with his wife. He followed her around like an adoring lapdog, marveling at how prim and decorous she seemed in public. Her newly sophisticated wardrobe erased any vestige of the rural milkmaid and yet, even in sleek Chanel dresses and gauzy Schiaparelli gowns, Opal always appeared chaste and demure.
    Another story blossomed in the privacy of their boudoir. The wonder of those silken nights thrilled him to the core: the electric touch of her firm, youthful breasts, nipples gone hard from the warmth of his breath hovering before a kiss; the delicious sweetness of her pouting mouth, her wet, flowing orgasms; the languid magic of pliant limbs enfolding him in an embrace more mysterious than anything he’d ever known, for all his profligate ways. She held him under a spell with the faraway look in her emerald eyes. Ageless, inviolate, she stared into his soul as if across an immutable chasm of lost time.
    She definitely improved his standing in society. Although their invitations were accepted at first out of curiosity, everyone coming to meet the new Mrs. Fletcher went away charmed by her quiet, unassuming manner. And what began as mere polite inquiry regarding tales of divination in New Hampshire evolved into weekly séances in the Queen Anne library on the second floor of the big house on Eighty-fifth Street. It became quite the thing to do. In no time at all, young, dark-haired Opal assumed the mantle of psychic consultant to the Four Hundred.
    For the best part of five years, life for Mrs. Fletcher remained a constant round of luncheons, concerts, tea dances, nights at the opera, theater openings, and charity balls. Although raised on Elbert Hubbard and the folksy poems of Edgar Guest, Opal now quoted Freud and Amy Lowell. She was a quick study. Whatever lingered of the naive country bumpkin added an appealing edge of self-mockery to her air of fashionable world-weariness.
    Mr. Fletcher sported a smug smile his friends found most irritating. Proud of his new, unearned respectability, he delighted whenever he detected glowering envy in the eyes of fellow members at the Century Club. Opal was a strange girl, quiet and introspective. She required a daily quota of solitude. No complaints from Walter, as she never nagged about his club life or the times he came in late. He didn’t stay out all that often, intoxicated more by sleeping with his wife. She twined her downy, slender arms around him, resting her cameo head upon his chest, and dreams more magical than any from childhood transported him through the night.
    His luck at cards remained unchanged. He was in the habit of losing frequently at Canfield’s Gambling House, an establishment operating outside the law since before the turn of the century. “You know what they say…?” His eyes always