She did not go directly to his office; instead, she dawdled a bit over the shop windows.  Things were appallingly high, she noted with growing dismay, especially the evening gowns.  On the shrugging, simpering French wax figures they were at once very scant and very vivid ... strung with beads and shot through with gold thread or spangled with flashing sequins.  She tried to imagine Mrs. Hilmer in one of these gaudy confections.  Almost any of them would have looked well on Helen herself.  But any woman who went in for dressing at all would need a trunkload, she concluded, if one were to decently last out a season.  She found herself speculating on just what class of people would invest in these hectic flesh coverings.  Certainly not the enormously rich ... they didn’t buy their provocative draperies from show windows.  And even the comfortably off might pause, she thought, before throwing a couple of hundred dollars into a wisp of veiling that didn’t reach much below the knees and would look like a weather-beaten cobweb after the second wearing.  With all this talk about profiteering and economy and the high cost of living, even Helen Starratt had to admit that one could go without an evening gown at two hundred dollars.  But, judging from the shoppers on the street, there didn’t seem to be many who intended to do without them.  She began to wonder what her chances were for at least a spring tailor-made.  She supposed now, with Fred going into business, she would be expected to make her old one do.  Well, she decided she wouldn’t make it do if she had to beg on the street corner.  She’d had it a year and a half, and during war times that was quite all right.  The best people had played frumpish parts then.  But now everybody was perking up.  As for an evening gown ... well, she simply couldn’t conceive where even a hundred dollars would be available for one of these spangled harem veils that was passing muster as a full-grown dress...  If she had possessed untold wealth, all this flimsiness, this stylistic froth, would have appealed to her; as it was, she was irritated by it.  What were things coming to? she demanded.  Just when you thought you were up to the minute, the styles changed overnight.  It was the same with household furniture.  Ten years ago, when she and Fred had set up housekeeping, everybody had exclaimed over her quaint bits of mahogany, her neutral window drapes, even at her wonderful porcelain gas range.  Now, everything, from bed to dining-room table, was painted in dull colors pricked by gorgeous designs; the hangings at the windows screamed with color; electric stoves were coming in.  The day of polished surfaces and shining brass was over—­antiques were no longer the rage.