Here it comes, Mary-Jean told herself. Personal adornment. Cosmetics? Jewelry? The pitch was coming down to earth.
"Personal adornments," the peddler went on, "to change your life, to remove it from the sphere of the humdrum, to—"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, come to the point," Mary-Jean snapped irritably. She did not want to admit that she was disappointed because the peddler seemed to be coming out of the clouds of her pipe-dreams and down to earth.
"Personal adornments," the peddler went on, unconcerned, "which each and every still-young housewife, every victim of the mundane and prosaic, craves. For example, if I were to ask you what personal adornment, either general or specific, you craved the most, what would be your answer?"
Mary-Jean perked up. There still was no beauty cream or hand-balm or one ounce of imported Parisian perfume. And there was, she had to admit, an intriguing question. Ordinarily, she found herself thinking, a girl would need days and days to decide on an answer to a question like that. But this wasn't ordinarily. This question had come on the heels of Mary-Jean's monthly reading of Woman's Home Journal. And what, Mary-Jean thought, did the young woman who had gone to Caracas, Venezuela, and the one who had been an Army nurse in divided Berlin, and the one who had spent a summer with the potentate's son in Shalimar, Kashmir—what did they all have in common? What was it they had which Mary-Jean so craved?
They attracted.
Attracted, she thought. And she did not merely mean attracted men, although that was part of it. To be sure, she told herself dreamily, all but forgetting the little peddler for the moment, sex-appeal was a part of it, perhaps a considerable part. But it was by no means all. For Mary-Jean did not want to attract men for their sake alone. She was happily, if mundanely, married. Universal sex-appeal was, thus, an adjunct to what she wanted, but not the sum-total of it. Mary-Jean wanted to attract, all right. She wanted to attract like the Caracas girl or the Army nurse or the Shalimar girl, the girl of the Vale of a Thousand Delights.
She said, "You—you won't think I'm silly?"
"My dear lady! I consider no requests silly, I assure you."