Summary

Walking to her dinner reservation, Lillian recollects the time she was invited to eat a meal at a soup kitchen (Chapter 6). She was well-off, but she attended just the same. She met people down on their luck and realized that some days she forgot to eat and talked to no one besides her cat.

In Chapter 7, the novel flashes back to Lillian’s life in the 1920s, when she was living with her friend Helen in the Christian Women’s Hotel. She and Helen – along with a roommate, Ginny – put on Greek tragedies to earn money to rent their own apartment. They told the boardinghouse matron, Miss Lockhart, that their productions were to earn money for charity. At the same time, Helen and Lillian date two men, Abe and Dickie, with whom they have sex and break curfew. Neither woman wants to marry...