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"Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?"
a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and
where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation.
A sacrifice to the god Capitalism
"From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents.
How very zen
The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use;
Certainly no one need have confessed such acquiescence in her lot as was revealed in the "useful" colour of Gerty Farish's gown and the subdued lines of her hat:
She's Gay!
was as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room:
There was to be plantation music in the studio after dinner—for
An Italian Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements with the step-father were being drawn up.
It had been, in the consecrated phrase, "always understood" that Mrs. Peniston was to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter's mind the understanding had long since crystallized into fact.
Foreshadowing
once she's talked about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.—My
"The truth is I was HORRID, Lily, and I've wanted to tell you so ever since."
Narrative convenience and Deus ex Machina all in one
both like to be the most important people in sight, so they've started a sort of continuous performance of their own, a kind of social Coney Island, where everybody is welcome who can make noise enough and doesn't put on airs.
Uniquely American society
But now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the people who taught her to care for them have abandoned her too;
Gerty, I know, is eager to make such an arrangement, and would be quite happy in it——"
the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them.
The parable of the sower
