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33, she met Count Carlos Armando. Within three months they were man and wife.
    The “Count” Armando was a self-conferred title which no one, least of all Carlos, took seriously. His origin had a floating base; not even his name could be taken for granted. He was altogether charming about it. He claimed Spanish, Roman, Portuguese, and mixed Greek-and-Romanian descent as the fancy took him; once he even said his mother had been an Egyptian. One of his friends of the international set (a real count) laughed, “In direct descent from Cleopatra, obviously,” and Carlos, showing his brilliant teeth, laughed back, “Of course, caro. By way of Romeo.” Those who claimed the worthiest information asserted that his parents had been gypsies and that he had been born in a caravan by the side of some squalid Albanian road. It might well have been so.
    None of this seemed to make any difference to the women in his life. Like obedient tin soldiers, they fell to his amorous fire in ranks. He kept his ammunition dry as a matter of working principle, careful not to allow it to sputter away because of an honest emotion. Women were his profession. He had never worked an otherwise gainful day in his life.
    Carlos’s first marriage, when he was 19, had been to an oil dowager from Oklahoma. She was exactly three times his age, with a greed for male youth that amused him. She cast him adrift well within two years, having barged into a beautiful boy from Athens. His severance pay was considerable, and Carlos spent a mad year throwing it away.
    His second wife was a wealthy Danish baroness, with the features of a cathedral gargoyle, whose chief delight was to dress his curly black hair as if he were a doll. Four months of lying on couches with those terrible fingers creeping about his head were enough for Carlos; he seduced his wife’s bedazzled secretary, contrived to be caught at it, and gallantly insisted on being paid off.
    Another year of high life, and Carlos began to look around again.
    He discovered a United States senator’s juicy little 16-year-old daughter summering in the Alps; the resulting scandal involved a highly paid Swiss abortionist (from whom Carlos collected 15 percent) and a very large senatorial check, conditional upon his silence, with the threat of prosecution to enforce it.
    The years marched by, and with them a grand parade of wives, all rich and silly and old enough to be his mother: a New York socialite who divorced her banker husband in order to marry him (this union broke up after a $100,000 brawl at an all-night party in his wife’s Newport villa that made tabloid history); an alcoholic Back Bay spinster whose simple escutcheon was first plotted at Plymouth Rock; a Hungarian countess dying of tuberculosis (she left him nothing but a castle surrounded by a stagnant moat and debts—with easy foresight he had run through her fortune before her death); an aging Eurasian ex-beauty he quite literally sold to a rich Turk whose real objective was her nubile daughter (as she had been Carlos’s); a Chicago meatpacker’s widow who, accompanied by a photographer, surprised him in her maid’s bed and booted him out without a penny’s salve, even producing the photographs in court—to Carlos’s smarting surprise—with unsporting disdain for the press.
    This debacle left him in financial extremis. He was in great need when he met GeeGee Guild.
    Not that Glory was so hard to take; she was still attractive, and younger at their meeting than any of his ex-wives had been. Still, to Carlos the prime question was: Is she rich enough? He had led a cowboy’s life herding idleness, and it was beginning to leave its brand on his dark athletic flesh, or so he fancied from increasing self-study in his mirror. The middle-aged and old ones who, like his first wife, sought to lap thirstily from the waterhole of male youth might soon notice the flattening taste of Count