Half Loaves by Margaret Culkin Banning

Fliss, opening her eyes reluctantly, found them resting on a fat gray roll of dust under her bureau. It made her uncomfortable and discouraged. She closed her eyes and shifted her position in bed, but waking on the other side was just as bad. Her window curtain hung saggily in soiled folds to greet her. She hated to see such things, not that they aroused in her any ambition to remedy the particular phases of slack housekeeping and tawdry living, but they emphasized her dislike of her home and all that surrounded it. She thought it utterly unjust that she should have to live in such an environment when there were so many girls her own age awaking to pleasant, clean, beautifully furnished rooms, and her ambition was not to reform the things about her but to discard them as quickly as possible. In this revealing morning hour Fliss usually faced her problems. There was no occasion for bluff since she was alone and her background gave her no advantages. Last night at one of the club cotillions she had worn a yellow malines scarf about her head and yellow satin slippers and never for a moment lost her rôle of gayety incarnate. This morning the yellow slippers poked their toes out from under a chair, streaks on them showing only too plainly that they had been dyed and the yellow scarf lay abandoned on her bureau, its charm and crispness gone forever. Her mood matched her wrecked finery. The crispness and charm had gone out of her too.

For nearly a year and a half now she had been out of school, searching in her vague, unskilled way for a chance to establish herself more securely and comfortably. A year and a half might not be long for a débutante, but Fliss knew that she could not take her own time. It was hard enough now to maintain her place, such as it was, without letting people tire of her. Also the time had sharpened her sense of values. She was not yet quite sure of what she wanted, but she knew most definitely what she did not want. Marriage for the sake of marriage had not the least appeal for her. She knew too much about the sordid parts of domesticity for that. There were too many girls who had a brief career of local popularity and were now wheeling baby carriages and making over last year's hats; too many young men who, unmarried, had danced and flirted their gay way through society only to become preoccupied, somewhat shabby, hard-working flat-dwellers after their marriage. Fliss had no intention of making any blunder which would land her in such an existence. She was nice to all men. That was because it was wise, lest they become malicious, and because it kept her in practice. But she was more chary with her kisses than she had been in High School and she had learned many new ways of getting without giving.