springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards which war had
torn from the old.

Social lines tightened. Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while
they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or
"family." The "doughboy shavetail", a hero before the armistice, or the
aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his
serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a
nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.

I was heartsick. I thought often of those splendid men I had met in
France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians.
I wondered if any one back home was "just nodding" to them.

Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.

New money always glitters. I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and
gold fittings, diamonds big as birds' eggs, ermine coats in the
daytime--jeweled heels at night.

Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner. At
private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they
were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat
with comfort.

One day I went to market--the kind of a market to which my mother would
have gone--and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy
any but porterhouse steaks--merely because porterhouse steak stood for
prosperity.