"ought," her heart was hot with resentment against them.

For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live through
these bad times than it is for one who has never known anything
better. Like a figure of painted and brightly varnished wood,
Ella Dowling sat against the wall through dance after dance with
glassy imperturbability; it was easier to be wooden, Alice
thought, if you had your mother with you, as Ella had. You were
left with at least the shred of a pretense that you came to sit
with your mother as a spectator, and not to offer yourself to be
danced with by men who looked you over and rejected you--not for
the first time. "Not for the first time": there lay a sting!
Why had you thought this time might be different from the other
times? Why had you broken your back picking those hundreds of
violets?

Hating the fatuous young men in the doorways more bitterly for
every instant that she had to maintain her tableau, the smiling
Alice knew fierce impulses to spring to her feet and shout at
them, "You IDIOTS!" Hands in pockets, they lounged against the
pilasters, or faced one another, laughing vaguely, each one of
them seeming to Alice no more than so much mean beef in clothes.
She wanted to tell them they were no better than that; and it
seemed a cruel thing of heaven to let them go on believing
themselves young lords. They were doing nothing, killing time.
Wasn't she at her lowest value at least a means of killing time?
Evidently the mean beeves thought not. And when one of them
finally lounged across the corridor and spoke to her, he was the
very one to whom she preferred her loneliness.