_This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the “Smart
Set” in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the
spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great
impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general
hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my
story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a
pattern--a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New
York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the
younger generation._