As is often the case their indulgences kept them fresher and younger-looking than their hard-working, respectable contemporaries, since they spent so much more time taking care of their faces and figures than did their righteous friends who worked, spurned temptations, and foolishly trusted God instead of Elizabeth Arden to reward them with a complexion. Caroline was hard and fit, a trim size fourteen, with a fine jaw-line, carefully tinted dark-gold hair, and except for too pale near-sighted eyes and a wide mouthful of strong white teeth that seemed capable of crunching the bones of her human obstacles, she could pass as an attractive thirty-five instead of forty-two. Lorna was small, with a brown pixie face and a mop of curls that she ruefully termed "prematurely white." For years she had threatened to dye her hair but always yielded to her friends' obliging plea not to touch it! That white hair is the most striking thing in town! Of course the only person who sincerely liked the white mat was Lorna herself, but she was happy in her conceit and seldom wore a hat, shaking her curls like a restless pony until someone said "Do you mind my saying you have the most individual hair I've ever seen?" In spite of their years of intimacy the two friends belonged to different sets. Lorna, the artist, sometimes went to Caroline's parties and sat aloof with an extremely mean pixie sneer for Caroline's wholesale jobbers, visiting silverware buyers, and department store heads. When Caroline tried to bring good-natured guests over to Lorna's corner Lorna snubbed them curtly. Sometimes when the party was at its gayest with no one noticing her aloofness Lorna would pass out just for spite and whatever gentleman was being the life of the party would be called upon to walk her around the block, take her home, or do something for her that would disrupt the general gaiety. In spite of her own commercial success, Lorna's friends were mostly poor or pretentiously Bohemian, loudly literary or artistic, and at her own rare parties one of them invariably managed to make some crack about Caroline's expensive get-ups which would either send Caroline home in a rage or keep her apologizing to them for hours for her superior earning powers. "Caroline can be such a Babbitt," Lorna told her friends. As for Caroline she had taken to making bets at her own parties on just how soon Lorna would "do her stuff" and just who would be drafted into service. She knew Lorna's moment for vapors was bound to come when some talented guest was about to take the center of the stage by song or dance; she knew, too, that having spoiled the show Lorna would revive suddenly if the wrong man was pressed to take care of her, holding out for the party's key man with extraordinary genius, passing out, reviving, and fading again until she'd gotten the man she (and usually Caroline) wanted.

Both ladies talked in confidence of their frustrations in the quest for love, but the truth was they had gotten all they wanted of the commodity and had no intention of making the least sacrifice of comfort for a few Cupid feathers. The men with whom they occasionally dined had a way of needling them or as Caroline said "getting her ego down" because men were jealous of a woman's financial success. Men forgave genius, or a succés d'estime in a woman, but her financial advantage infuriated them. Women forgave success in business but never forgave success with men. One thing Caroline and Lorna had in common was an overpowering reverence for high-brows, no matter how obscure. Each had met friends' friends of great erudition who dazzled them with thoughts and phrases gloriously beyond their own intellectual means, something they could wonder at with neither envy of the possessor nor the desire to buy. Since they were able to afford what material objects they craved, they missed the innocent female joy of window-shopping, admiring something without the disappointment of possession. On their rare opportunities to worship an articulate Brain they listened raptly; the facile conversation on politics, philosophy and particularly scholarly facets of literature they rubbed in their scalps as earnestly as if it was a new tonic and tried the phrases on their mouths like the latest lipstick. They were as proud of their respect for learning as if their awe in itself was a credit to them, an achievement close to magic.