By gesture she was pretending and by words and
by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged
to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do,
that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a
higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined--she wore a last
year's hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and
palpably artificial than herself.
Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the
impression that she was only condescendingly present. For _me_, her eyes
said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with
belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.
--And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though
they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of
place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was
near by and convenient--every party in the restaurant poured out that
impression ... who knew? They were forever changing class, all of
them--the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men
striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous
advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone.
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