modern, with metal-sheathed elevators, and tiled vestibules, and
heavy, plate-glass windows on the street. There was a drug store
quite modern enough to be facing upon Forty-second Street and
Broadway, instead of the tree-shaded peace of Santa Paloma's main
street. At its cool and glittering fountain indeed, a hundred drinks
could be mixed of which Broadway never even heard. And on Broadway,
three thousand miles away, the women who shopped were buying the
same boxed powders, the same bottled toilet waters, the same
patented soaps and brushes and candies that were to be found here.
And in the immense grocery store nearby there were beautifully
spacious departments worthy of any great city, devoted to rare
fruits, and coffees and teas, and every pickle that ever came in a
glass bottle, and every little spiced fish that ever came in a gay
tin. A white-clad young man "demonstrated" a cake-mixer, a blue-clad
young woman "demonstrated" jelly-powders.

Nearby were the one or two big dry-goods stores, with lovely gowns
in their windows, and milliners' shops, with French hats in their
smart Paris boxes--there was even a very tiny, very elegant little
shop where pastes and powders and shampooing were the attraction; a
shop that had a French name "et Cie" over the door.

In short, there were modern women, and rich women, in Santa Paloma,
as these things unmistakably indicated. Where sixty years ago there
had been but a lonely outpost on a Spanish sheep-ranch, and where
thirty years after that there was only a "general store" at a
crossroads, now every luxury in the world might be had for the
asking.

All this part of the town lay northeast of the sleepy little Lobos