inual pull against ill health and
genteel poverty. Or they would have been smothered in the plump
content of Mrs. Hilmer. Helen Starratt's slenderness had still a
virginal quality and she knew every artifice that heightened this
effect. To-day she was a trifle startled at quite the lengths she had
gone to strike a note of sophisticated youth. She had long since
ceased dressing consciously for her husband, and dressing for other
women was more a matter of perfect detail than attempted beguilement.
She was curious, she told herself, to see whether a man like Hilmer
would be impressed by feminine artifice... Did a black silk gown, with
spotless lace at wrist and throat, spell the acme of Hilmer's ideal of
womanhood? Was woman to him something durable and utilitarian or did
his fancy sometimes carry him to more decorative ideals?

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 hal