New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women white collar workers -- Fiction
Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz was a regular visitant at the flat of Mrs.
Lawrence and Una. Mrs. Lawrence liked him; in his presence she abandoned
her pretense of being interested in Mamie Magen's arid intellectualism,
and Una's quivering anxieties. Mr. Schwirtz was ready for any party,
whenever he was "in off the road."
Una began to depend on him for amusements. Mrs. Lawrence encouraged her
to appear at her best before him. When he or one of Mrs. Lawrence's men
was coming the two women had an early and quick dinner of cold ham and
canned soup, and hastily got out the electric iron to press a frock;
produced Pemberton's Flesh-Tinted Vanisho Powder, and the lip-stick
whose use Una hated, but which she needed more and more as she came back
from the office bloodless and cold. They studied together the feminine
art of using a new veil, a flower, or fresh white-kid gloves, to change
one's appearance.
Poor Una! She was thinking now, secretly and shamefacedly, of the
"beautifying methods" which she saw advertised in every newspaper and
cheap magazine. She rubbed her red, desk-calloused elbows with
Pemberton's cold-cream. She cold-creamed and massaged her face every
night, standing wearily before a milky mirror in the rather close and
lingerie-scattered bedroom, solemnly rotating her fingers about her
cheeks and forehead, stopping to conjecture that the pores in her nose
were getting enlarged. She rubbed her hair with Pemberton's "Olivine and
Petrol" to keep it from growing thin, and her neck with cocoanut oil to
make it more full. She sent for a bottle of "Mme. LeGrand's
Bust-Developer," and spent several Saturday afternoons at the beauty
parlors of Mme. Isoldi, where in a little booth shut off by a
white-rubber curtain, she received electrical massages, applications of
a magic N-ray hair-brush, vigorous cold-creaming and warm-compressing,
and enormous amounts of advice about caring for the hair follicles, from
a young woman who spoke French with a Jewish accent.
By a twist of psychology, though she had not been particularly fond of
Mr. Schwirtz, but had anointed herself for his coming because he was a
representative of men, yet after months of thus dignifying his
attentions, the very effort made her suppose that she must be fond of
him. Not Mr. Schwirtz, but her own self did she befool with Pemberton's
"Preparations de Paris."
Sometimes with him alone, sometimes with him and Mrs. Lawrence and one
of Mrs. Lawrence's young businessman attendants, Una went to theaters
and dinners and heterogeneous dances.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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