A notice of appeal
was served upon Edward Shuttleworth. The case was going to the court of
last resort, and they were in for another interminable wait. Six months,
perhaps a year. It had grown enormously unreal to them, remote and
uncertain as heaven.
Throughout the previous winter one small matter had been a subtle and
omnipresent irritant--the question of Gloria's gray fur coat. At that
time women enveloped in long squirrel wraps could be seen every few
yards along Fifth Avenue. The women were converted to the shape of tops.
They seemed porcine and obscene; they resembled kept women in the
concealing richness, the feminine animality of the garment. Yet--Gloria
wanted a gray squirrel coat.
Discussing the matter--or, rather, arguing it, for even more than in the
first year of their marriage did every discussion take the form of
bitter debate full of such phrases as "most certainly," "utterly
outrageous," "it's so, nevertheless," and the ultra-emphatic
"regardless"--they concluded that they could not afford it. And so
gradually it began to stand as a symbol of their growing
financial anxiety.
To Gloria the shrinkage of their income was a remarkable phenomenon,
without explanation or precedent--that it could happen at all within the
space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty, conceived and
executed by a sardonic God.
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