“Oh, Ethel, go slow, you little fool.  This is every penny you have in the world.”

But the adorable things she saw, and the growing hunger she felt as she began to notice with a more discerning eye the women in shops and on the streets—­just why they were so dashing and how they got this and that effect—­all swept aside her caution, the easier because of the fact that everything she bought was charged.

One evening in a large cafe she sat watching Amy who was dancing with her husband.  It was at the time when the new style dances were just coming into vogue.  In Ohio they had been only a myth.  But Amy was a beautiful dancer; and watching her now, Ethel reflected, “She expects me to be like that.  If I’m not, she’ll be disappointed, ashamed.  And why shouldn’t I be!  What do you ever get in this world if you’re always saving every cent?  You miss your chance and then it’s too late.  I’ll be meeting her friends in a few weeks more.  I’ve simply got to hurry!” And with Amy’s dancing teacher she arranged for lessons—­at a price that made her gasp.  But the lessons were a decided success.

“You’ve a wonderful figure for dancing,” the teacher said confidingly, “and a sense for rhythm that most of these women haven’t any idea of.”  He smiled down at her and she fairly beamed.

“Oh, how nice!” sighed Ethel.  Something in the little look which flashed between them gave her a thrill of assurance.  And this feeling came again and again, in the shops and while she was seated at luncheon in some crowded restaurant, or on the streets or back at home, where even Joe was beginning to show his admiring surprise.

“You’re making a fine little job of it,” she heard him say to Amy one night.

She caught other remarks and glances from strangers, men and women.  And Ethel now began to feel the whole vast bustling ardent town centred on what in her high-school club, as they read Bernard Shaw, they had quite frankly and solemnly spoken of as “Sex.”  All the work and the business, the scheming and planning and rush for money, were focussed on this.  And for this she was attracting those swift admiring glances.  What she would be, what she wanted to be, what she now ardently longed to become, grew clearer to her day by day.  For the picture was there before her eyes.  Each day it grew more familiar, as at home in Amy’s room she watched her beautiful sister, a stranger no longer to her now, seated at her dressing table good-humouredly chatting, and meanwhile revealing by numberless deft little things she was doing the secrets of clothes and of figure, and of cheeks and lips and eyes, with subtle hints behind it all of the ancient magic art of Pan.  She felt Amy ceaselessly bringing her out.  This gave her thrills of excitement.  And looking at her sister she asked: 

“Shall I ever be like that?”

And they kept talking, talking.  And through it all the same feeling was there, the sense of this driving force of the town.