You will argue that any woman with an empty stomach and a fur coat ought to sell the coat for a shabby one and spend the money for food. That is because you have never been a lady bum. A fur coat gets her places that a full stomach never would. It is her entrée into hotel washrooms when she is dirty from job hunting. It gets her into department-store rest rooms when she is sore of foot. And in the last stages it gets her help from a certain class of people who would be glad to help her if she had suddenly lost her purse, but who never would if she had never had a purse. And then, most important of all, it helps her to hang on to her last scraps of self-respect.[23] 21. Alice ... wants to be somebody, to do great things, to be superior. In her good moods, she is overwhelmed with dreams of accomplishment. She pines to use good English, to be a real lady. There is pathos in her inquiry as to what you say when a boy introduces you to his mother and how to behave in a stylish hotel dining room. Such questions have an importance that is almost greater than the problem of how to keep straight sexually. Winning of social approval is an ever-present, burning desire, but she has no patterns, no habits, no control over the daily details of the process whereby this is gained. When one tries to place her in a good environment with girls of a better class, she reacts with a deepened sense of inferiority, expressed in more open, boastful wildness. She invents adventures with men to dazzle these virtuous, superior maidens. The craving for pleasures and something to make her forget increases.[24]