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.