How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere.
You see a little crowd of women come into the Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry in Novellapolis in the fresh West. When they remove their automobile veils you see that they were once, and very recently, the nicest sort of members of the sewing circle and the W. C. T. U. of Lone Tree Crossing.
When the waiter comes along with their cocktails and they begin to sip them out of their tea-cups, you wake up with a jerk to realize that it's half-past three in the afternoon and the evening has begun.
How rapid it all is!
There's Margaret Simpson. A few years ago you might have seen her pumping the water for Jim's breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking bugs off the potato vines.
Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented bottle-stopper. He's a pavement contractor. His wife has just as much leisure as any duchess.
The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Down-town District, cooperatively owned, cooperatively maintained, magnificently equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest-rooms of the department stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and pay no more attention to the florist than to one's own gardener, with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St. DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty-shops, with coachmen on the taxi-cabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the Novellapolis Athletic Club—an infinitely resourceful estate, which Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.
This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel scales, and after an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company-light-therapy weighed out at 182-6.
At luncheon she ate only puree of tomatoes, creamed chicken-and-sweetbreads, Boston brown bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.
After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It ended up with: "Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and dieting I've been doing I can't wear under a twenty-seven? It's ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These stock sizes all run large. If it's made-to-order I can wear a twenty-six as easy as anybody."