Chapters 7, 8, and 9 Summary

Elizabeth sits in her uncle's house and reads. Her father had been sometimes successful and from fourteen to sixteen years of age she spent a few years at an exclusive public school—the period formed her entire worldview and everything in Elizabeth's experience is either "lovely", or expensive and aristocratic, or "beastly", which is cheap, low, shabby, or bad. After her father's financial failure in 1919 and subsequent death, her mother determined to become an artist and moved to Paris where rents were less expensive. Elizabeth worked as an English-language instructor and lived independently in a tiny apartment; she considers this two-year period of her life to have been rather "beastly". Elizabeth recalls the Parisian literary crowd with horror, and shudders at the thought of any man discarding income in favor of aesthetics. After her mother's death from ptomaine poisoning, she...