Young People's Pride by Stephen Vincent Benet

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street -- she heads letters from it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes -- Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books -- a countable number of them -- and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.

Mrs. Winters herself -- the Mrs. Winters who is _so_ interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to -- every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her "cultivated" voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of _glace_ fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax -- Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers -- a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.