They stood by glass tables piled high with filmy and costly underwear, such underwear as Sylvia had never dreamed could exist, and Aunt Victoria looked casually at the cobweb tissues which the saleswoman held up, herself hankering in a hungry adoration of the luxury she would never touch in any other way.  Without apology or explanation, other than Aunt Victoria’s gracious nod of dismissal, they moved on to the enchanted cave where, under the stare of innumerable electric lights, evening wraps were exhibited.  The young woman who served them held the expensive, fragile chiffon of the garments up in front of her black uniform, her eyes wistful and unsatisfied.  Her instant of glory was over when Aunt Victoria bought one of these, exclaiming humorously about the quaintness of going from Paris to Chicago to shop.  It was of silver tissue over white brocade, with a collar of fur, and the price was a hundred and thirty-seven dollars.  Sylvia’s allowance for all her personal expenses for a whole year was a hundred and twenty.  To reach the furniture, they passed by, with an ignoring contempt, huge counters heaped with hundreds and hundreds of shirt-waists, any one of which was better than the one Sylvia had made with so much care and interest before leaving home.

Among the furniture they made a long stay.  Aunt Victoria was unexpectedly pleased by the design of the wicker pieces, and bought and bought and bought; till Sylvia turned her head away in bewilderment.  She looked down a long perspective of glittering show-cases filled with the minor luxuries of the toilet, the ruffs, the collars, the slipper-rosettes, the embroidered belts, the hair ornaments, the chiffon scarves, all objects diverse, innumerable, perishable as mist in tree-branches, all costly in exact ratio to their fragility.  Back of her were the children’s dresses, fairy-like, simple with an extravagantly costly simplicity.  It occurred to Sylvia as little as to many others of the crowd of half-hypnotized women, wandering about with burning eyes and watering mouths through the shrewdly designed shop, that the great closets back of these adroitly displayed fineries might be full of wearable, firm-textured little dresses, such as she herself had always worn.  It required an effort of the will to remember that, and wills weak, or not yet formed, wavered and bent before the lust of the eye, so cunningly inflamed.  Any sense of values, of proportion, in Sylvia was dumfounded by the lavishness, the enormous quantities, the immense varieties of the goods displayed.  She ached with covetousness....

When they joined the others at the hotel her mother, after commenting that she looked rather flushed and tired, happened to ask, “Oh, by the way, Sylvia, did you happen to come across anything in serge suits that would be suitable for school-wear?”