As the women came trooping in, arrayed for the
exhibition, some timid, others brazenly self-confident, they
seemed to be marching in time to the music, like so many
chorus-girls tripping before a theater audience, or like a
procession of model-girls at a style-display in a big department
store. Many of the women strutted affectedly, with "refined" mien.
Indeed, I knew that most of them had a feeling as though wearing a
hundred-and-fifty-dollar dress was in itself culture and education
Mrs. Kalch kept talking to me, now aloud, now in whispers. She
was passing judgment on the gowns and incidentally initiating me
into some of the innermost details of the gown race. It appeared
that the women kept tab on one another's dresses, shirt-waists,
shoes, ribbons, pins, earrings. She pointed out two matrons who
had never been seen twice in the same dress, waist, or skirt,
although they had lived in the hotel for more than five weeks. Of
one woman she informed me that she could afford to wear a new
gown every hour in the year, but that she was "too big a slob to
dress up and too lazy to undress even when she went to bed"; of
another, that she would owe her grocer and butcher rather than go
to the country with less than ten big trunks full of duds; of a third,
that she was repeatedly threatening to leave the hotel because its
bills of fare were typewritten, whereas "for the money she paid
she could go to a place with printed menu-cards.
Pages:
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669