Cass Timberlane, A Novel of Husbands and Wives by Sinclair Lewis

They never could recall how they had put in the rest of Tuesday morning, aside from reading the papers down to the auction notices, but they postponed the duty of reveling in the joys of New York till lunchtime. Then they had the great hours of shopping, and admitted that, in this, New York was superior. Jinny dropped the arm of her protector and stepped out and had a few things to say for herself.

She contradicted clerks, high impressive clerks with handkerchiefs like bishops' mitres in their breast-pockets. She yearned over furs and Irish linens and perfume-bottles with gold crowns for stoppers and folding card-tables so sturdy that you could sit on them--the clerk enthusiastically proved it. (He was fired for it, that evening; the table might have collapsed.) But there was a hard shrewdness in her, and she bought only one per cent of the things that she would die if she did not have.