“I don’t see how you do it!” Julie Arnold complained one day as Selina was paying her one of her rare visits in town. “Your eyes are as bright as a baby’s and mine look like dead oysters.” They were up in Julie’s dressing room in the new house on the north side—the new house that was now the old house. Julie’s dressing table was a bewildering thing. Selina DeJong, in her neat black suit and her plain black hat, sat regarding it and Julie seated before it, with a grim and lively interest. “It looks,” Selina said, “like Mandel’s toilette section, or a hospital operating room just before a major operation.” There were great glass jars that contained meal, white and gold. There were rows and rows of cream pots holding massage cream, vanishing cream, cleansing cream. There were little china bowls of scarlet and white and yellowish pastes. A perforated container spouted a wisp of cotton. You saw toilet waters, perfumes, atomizers, French soaps, unguents, tubes. It wasn’t a dressing table merely, but a laboratory. “This!” exclaimed Julie. “You ought to see Paula’s. Compared to her toilette ceremony mine is just a splash at the kitchen sink.” She rubbed cold cream now around her eyes with her two forefingers, using a practised upward stroke. “It looks fascinating,” Selina exclaimed. “Some day I’m going to try it. There are so many things I’m going to try some day. So many things I’ve never done that I’m going to do for the fun of it. Think of it, Julie! I’ve never had a manicure! Some day I’m going to have one. I’ll tell the girl to paint my nails a beautiful bright vermilion. And I’ll tip her twenty-five cents. They’re so pretty with their bobbed hair and their queer bright eyes. I s’pose you’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you they make me feel young.” Julie was massaging. Her eyes had an absent look. Suddenly: “Listen, Selina. Dirk and Paula are together too much. People are talking.” “Talking?” The smile faded from Selina’s face. “Goodness knows I’m not strait-laced. You can’t be in this day and age. If I had ever thought I’d live to see the time when—— Well, since the war of course anything’s all right, seems. But Paula has no sense. Everybody knows she’s insane about Dirk. That’s all right for Dirk, but how about Paula! She won’t go anywhere unless he’s invited. Of course Dirk is awfully popular. Goodness knows there are few enough young men like him in Chicago—handsome and successful and polished and all. Most of them dash off East just as soon as they can get their fathers to establish an Eastern branch or something. . . . They’re together all the time, everywhere. I asked her if she was going to divorce Storm and she said no, she hadn’t enough money of her own and Dirk wasn’t earning enough. His salary’s thousands, but she’s used to millions. Well!” “They were boy and girl together,” Selina interrupted, feebly. “They’re not any more. Don’t be silly, Selina. You’re not as young as that.”