Everything Glittered

by Robin Talley

Genres: YA Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Society girls try to find a murderer in a city filled with secrets and stunted by shame, in this queer hysterical thriller by award-winning author Robin Talley, perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

It’s 1927 and the strict laws of prohibition have done little to temper the roaring 20s nightlife, even in the nation’s capitol. Everyone knows the booze has never stopped flowing, especially amongst the rich and powerful, and seventeen-year-old Gertrude and her best friends Clara and Milly are determined to get a taste of freedom and liquor, propriety be damned.
 
But after sneaking out of the Washington Female Seminary to visit a speakeasy, they return to discover that their controversial young headmistress, Mrs. Rose, has been murdered. 
 
Reeling from the death of her beloved mentor, Gertrude enlists her friends in her quest to clear Mrs. Rose’s reputation, while trying to keep her own intact. But in Prohibition Washington, it’s difficult to sidestep grifters, bootleggers, and shady federal agents when investigating a murder. And with all the secrets being uncovered, Gertrude is finding it harder and harder to keep her attraction to her best friends hidden.  
 
A proper, upscale life is all Gertrude has ever known, but murder sure makes a gal wonder: is all that glitters really gold?

Release date: September 24, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

SOMETHING’S MOVING IN THE DARKNESS.

I pull back the curtain and press my forehead into the windowpane to get a better view, letting the politely strained murmurs and tinkling of punch glasses carry on without me. The party can wait.

The alley below us is only a few feet wide, with the Washington Female Seminary on one side and the Capital Electric Streetcar Repair Facility on the other, and it stretches from a narrow gate on P Street to a dim little courtyard behind the seminary’s laundry room and kitchen.

No one ever looks down into this alley. There’s never anything to see.

But I was sure I heard something.

Tonight’s faculty party is being held in the old library, where the windows are always kept tastefully draped. The real view is to the south, where the wide, smooth balcony hangs over busy P Street, and to the west, where the grandest window of all faces Dupont Circle. During the day, this little alley to the east is used by the maids and footmen and delivery boys to bring things in or out of our seminary, but at night, far from the reach of streetlights, only the occasional scurrying of mice and rats disturbs its darkness.

The shape out there now is too big to be a rat. It’s moving in a distinctly human way, too. Pacing in the tight expanse of pavement.

It’s difficult to be sure of much more. The shape could be a man, or it could be a woman. It could be more than one figure, moving in tandem. From two stories up, in the dark, it’s impossible to tell.

“Gertie?” Milly’s voice wavers behind me.

I don’t turn yet. I want to make sense of what’s happening outside. Why someone would be out there on so cold a night.

Then Milly says, “You’ve been asked for.”

And that gets my attention. Being needed always does.

I let the curtain fall and turn to face her, smiling. The old library’s a remnant from when this building was some rich man’s mansion, until he died and it became a finishing school for girls whose well-heeled parents want us to have some semblance of an education before we’re married. Today this room’s used solely for parties and teas, but the dead owner’s musty tomes still crowd the remaining bookshelves. Milly’s standing beside one of them now, gesturing apologetically with a black-gloved hand toward a cluster of girls on the other side of the room.

Milly’s the most fashionable girl at our seminary, with a wardrobe full of dresses custom-made in Paris. Tonight she’s chosen a black gown with a gold-and-onyx brooch that I’m sure cost far more than anything I’ve ever owned. Her thick yellow hair is coiled neatly above her neck—our hair is required to fall past our shoulders when loose, yet stay pinned up above our collars unless we’re inside our dormitory rooms—and she’s pulled it back on one side with a sparkling comb that shows off the silvery glow of her onyx drop earrings against the ivory of her skin. Her wrists are heavy with a half-dozen bangles that jingle prettily when she moves. But then, Milly does everything prettily.

We’ve been best friends since we were freshmen, stuffed into our tiny attic room. Our nights back then were spent burrowing into plush blankets to keep out the chill, whispering secrets under the row of miniature winged mermen carved into the hard gray mantel above our little fireplace.

Now, as seniors, we share a room with a broad window overlooking P Street, and tonight we’ll make good use of it.

As soon as we can make our escape from this awful library, packed with parents and teachers and upstanding old biddies who believe themselves the sole arbiters of what they call “Best Society,” we’ll meet up with Clara, and the three of us will trade in our long, demure party gowns for short, beaded dresses with rolled-down stockings. Then we’ll escape out the window and make our way to a speakeasy called the Lazy Susan.

Clara’s told us all about the speakeasies up in New York. The slow, flowing music. The dark secrets whispered in dark corners. The girls who dance with strangers, and drink in front of men, and speak aloud whatever thoughts come to mind without first considering propriety. Girls like the ones Mrs. Rose has known, whose lives are more than etiquette lessons and husband-hunting, and who care more for adventures than debutante gowns.

The hardest part has been keeping our plan secret. We can’t risk the rest of our friends getting into trouble for our sakes. Mrs. Rose may be more forgiving than some, but she’s headmistress all the same.

No one can find out. It’s as simple as that.

For a few hours, while our parents and teachers think we’re tucked into bed dreaming of our future mansions, the three of us will be out in the city, drinking bootleg liquor and listening to modern music and consorting with people of whom no one in this room would ever approve. And not a soul will be the wiser.

“What are you looking at?” Milly steps toward the window, peering out, but she doesn’t seem to notice the motion. Perhaps it’s stopped.

“Is it Clara?” I ask her. “Is it time to go?”

“Not yet. It’s something about a freshman losing her diamonds, but…”

“Gertie! There you are. You need to come. Trixie stole a girl’s earring, I’m sure it was her. She’s been acting even stranger than usual, and…”

Clara stops talking when I turn to face her, but my smile’s already grown wide.

I haven’t seen her since yesterday. She was late arriving to tonight’s party, after spending the Jewish Sabbath—she calls it Shabbat—with her cousins in Baltimore. That’s not so long to be apart, I suppose, but every time I see Clara after any interval, it feels as though the sun is coming out again.

Before this year it was always Milly and me, but when we met Clara four months back, everything changed.

I run the orientations for new students each September. Most are freshmen, of course, but Clara entered as a senior, so Mrs. Rose arranged for her to begin orientation a day later to avoid being lumped in with the younger girls.

So Clara came alone, her smile curving under a pair of knowing dark-brown eyes and a forbidden dark-brown bob. With her equally forbidden deep-red lipstick and the soft rosy tint to her cheeks, she looked like Lillian Gish in La Bohème. As though a title card might pop up at any moment and tell me what she was thinking.

That day, as I explained the rules and the daily schedule and showed her the room she’d share with Trixie—right next to mine, as it happened—Clara never wiped off her lipstick or apologized for her hair. She did ask several questions about school athletics, though. When I told her I was the basketball team captain, she immediately challenged me to a game.

“Unless you don’t like being unreservedly vanquished, that is,” she’d said, dark eyes gleaming.

I didn’t terribly mind the idea of being vanquished if Clara was going to be the one doing it, but I replied, “I should warn you. My nickname on the court is Unreserved Vanquisher.”

Clara started to giggle, then straightened her smile into a pretense of competition. “Earn it, then.”

We were both laughing before we’d laid a finger on the ball. I won that day, but it may have been because she let me.

On the first night Clara spent at the seminary, I learned that she was not only the daughter of a newly elected congressman, but the granddaughter of the proud owners of the best kosher grocery store in Brooklyn. I also learned that she knew a shocking number of curses, thanks to her older brothers. And that I laughed harder with her than I ever had with anyone but Milly.

Clara’s lived a far more interesting life than me. So has Milly, for that matter. Her father’s an ambassador. She’s lived all over Europe. I’ve spent my whole life here in Washington, DC, with only occasional trips to Baltimore or New York or Philadelphia, always under my mother’s watchful eye. Doing as I was told.

Two days after Clara’s arrival, the upperclassmen returned to the seminary, with Milly coming fresh from the RMS Mauretania’s transatlantic crossing. By then, Clara and I were sitting side-by-side at every meal and every evening social, and word had spread about the newest member of our senior class.

The halls had filled with fresh whispers. Girls murmuring that Clara had had to move due to some sort of scandal at her old school. Girls muttering that her parents had paid the board a fortune to let her in, given her hair and her history. Girls complaining at full voice in my hearing that she’d already been guaranteed a spot on the basketball team when half a dozen juniors were clamoring for it.

In the end, though, when the girls actually met Clara, they warmed up to her quickly, and the rumors stopped. In truth, when directly confronted with her smile, her warmth, it’s very nearly impossible to dislike Clara. The only two who had seemed immune were Trixie Babcock—who despised everyone—and Milly.

The first time she shook Clara’s hand in the dining room, Milly wouldn’t meet her eyes. Nor did she smile. All through dinner, she kept darting wary glances from Clara to me and back again. But after the dishes had been cleared and the girls had crowded into the windowless downstairs hall, where the smoke from the fires makes the whole world wonderfully strange and shadowy, Clara invited Milly to the billiards table.

I knew that night that I was watching something bloom between them. Something strong and real and entirely unexpected. Just as it had bloomed between me and each of them already.

By the end of the evening, the tension had dissolved, and we’d become a group of three.

We’ve stayed that way in the months since. Gray autumn afternoons feel lighter, warmer, when spent on a walk with the two most interesting people I’ve ever met, both of whom speak beautiful French and know how to serve tea, waltz, and curse in equal measure. Dreary Monday Bible classes take on an easy air when I’m enduring them with Milly on one side of me and Clara on the other, all of us trading furtive glances and barely suppressed giggles. Even the lectures my mother writes in her weekly letters are entertaining when I can read them aloud, imitating her very sternest tones, while Milly and Clara perch on my bed with laughter on their lips and gleams in their eyes, Clara’s dark brown and Milly’s light.

Some nights, when I fall asleep with Milly a few feet away and Clara on the other side of a thin white wall, those four brown eyes run in circles in my dreams. It’s enough to make any girl forget she’s supposed to give it all up to marry some faceless man and spend her days selecting curtain fabrics.

As I smile at Clara, she steps toward me, holding out a hand. Her dress is burgundy and falls gently to her ankles, with satin shoes to match, and her cheeks blush to nearly the same color when she spots Milly on the other side of the bookshelf. “Oh. Hello. Did you…”

“Yes.” Milly nods stiffly as the clock chimes in the grand hall. “I was informing Gertie of the situation, yes.”

They’re being awkward with each other, almost formal, and I don’t know why. It must be some joke I’m not privy to.

I straighten my spine and go along in my own overly prim voice. “Good evening, Clara. How do you do. It’s so good of you to call. Do leave your card with the butler, if you please.”

Clara laughs, still blushing.

Behind her, Mrs. Rose is watching us.

She’s hovering in the northwest corner of the room in her sleeveless gown, the deep orchid fabric falling to her calves over plain black stockings and patent-leather heels, her gleaming yellow hair fastened with a pair of feathered combs. She’s alone, as she usually is at faculty parties.

She dreads these affairs, she told me once. Then she laughed and asked me never to repeat that. It wasn’t a surprise—everyone knows Mrs. Rose doesn’t get along with most of the faculty, or with my classmates’ parents, for that matter—but it made me smile, that she trusted me enough to share her thoughts.

I smile at her again now, wishing it were proper etiquette to wave across a room. My mother isn’t far away, though, and I’d undoubtedly hear from her about my lack of refinement, and how she’d never have done such a thing in her day. My mother and Milly’s have been fast friends since they were in school together themselves, and sometimes I wonder if my mother would’ve preferred Milly for a daughter. My mother argues with Milly far less often than she does with me.

“Let’s, then.” Milly takes my hand and leads me through the clusters of partygoers, Clara on my other side.

As we pass them, we offer silent, polite smiles to the teachers, the board members, the little groups of parents, and the maids and waiters scattered around the edges of the room with their aprons and bow ties and trays laden with carefully wrapped canapés. The faculty party is a dry, low-key, off-season affair thrown by our parents, meant to thank the teachers for instructing us this term, but truly it’s an excuse to put on staid velvet and pearls and gather shoulder-to-shoulder on a Saturday night, listening to the plodding piano in the grand hall and getting scorched by the blazes in the carved-marble fireplaces.

“Miss Otis!” Mr. Farrel, our Latin teacher, stops Milly as we pass, nodding kindly at Clara and me. “I do hope you’re enjoying the Passio.”

“Oh yes, very much.” Milly offers him a gracious smile. “I appreciate your lending it to me.”

“I don’t get a lot of girls clamoring for volumes from my shelves. Had to buy more titles in French and Italian as well as Latin solely to keep up with your demands. You know, an old friend of Miss Parker’s is head of the romance languages department at Barnard. I know your heart lies in mathematics, but I think you’d find a lot to enjoy about studying in New York.”

“I imagine so.” Milly nods eagerly. “I didn’t realize Miss Parker had been to New York.”

“Oh, she hasn’t, she hasn’t.” Mr. Farrel shifts his gaze across the room to where Miss Parker, the trigonometry teacher who always scowls when asked a question and loves to whip out her ruler to assess our skirt lengths, is sipping her punch and watching us. Her eyes look tired and watery, almost as though she’s inebriated, though that’s impossible. She must simply be exhausted. “But you’ll soon learn how it is with old friends from finishing school. Though I don’t mean to suggest that our esteemed seminary is merely a finishing school. You girls learn a great deal here, and some of you may well go on to further education! Why, a few of the women’s colleges are nearly as good as their brother schools, and… Oh, dear, were you on your way to see Miss Baker?” He glances over at Elizabeth. “Poor girl seems to be in a state again. You’d better go and help.”

“How do you do, Mr. Farrel,” I chorus with Milly and Clara, each of us bobbing our heads in turn, and we walk as fast as decorum allows toward where a dozen girls have gathered by the northern wall.

Elizabeth Baker is at the center of the group, her face streaked with tears. Seminary girls lose things all the time, from eighty-nine-cent silk gloves to ruby-studded heirloom bracelets and fox-fur coats, but it’s different for Elizabeth. Ever since her mother died last year, she’s been clinging to what she has left of hers—mainly, her jewels. The trouble is, Elizabeth has always been forgetful.

“What size are the diamonds, exactly?” I ask, after several eager young voices have attempted to explain the situation, leaving me with a confused muddle.

“Quite small. Well, one is.” Elizabeth, with her pale hair, flushed cheeks, and a wobbling lower lip, shows me a single earring, freshly plucked from her earlobe and cradled in her palm. The diamonds are a deep blue, nearer to sapphires in color. “See here, the stone on top is tiny. The one below, a trifle larger. I was supposed to save them for the dance, and my father said if I lost any more jewelry, he’d…”

“I understand.” I take Elizabeth’s hand in mine gently, and fold her fingers closed over her remaining earring. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

“I’ll tell you where to look.” Milly tilts her head at Trixie Babcock.

Trixie doesn’t see us, though. Her lips are tight under the fringe of her dark-brown bangs, and she’s striding across the room toward Mrs. Rose.

As a new student, Clara got stuck sharing a room with her. Trixie has the most luxurious suite in the seminary, with its own little sitting room, but all the same, no one would consent to be her roommate.

She’d roomed with a freshman last year, and only a few days into term, Trixie told everyone the poor girl still wet the bed. It turned out she’d started the rumor because the girl refused to let Trixie have her best seal stole, even though Trixie’s the richest girl at the seminary and probably has three seal stoles of her own.

“Don’t worry,” I assure Elizabeth as Trixie approaches our headmistress. Mrs. Rose offers her a strained smile. Even she can’t manage with Trixie. “We’ll find it before your father notices. He’s not even paying attention, is he?”

We all glance at the center of the room, where Elizabeth’s father is standing in a large group of men that also includes my father, Clara’s, and Trixie’s, plus a dozen more, all of them wearing three-piece suits with cigars bulging from the pockets. They’d never smoke in the presence of ladies, but it’s clear from the way their fingers keep reaching out to stroke their pockets that they’re itching for the moment they can head down to the tobacco room and strike their matches.

Laughter arises from the group, and a man at the center—I think it’s Trixie’s father, but it’s hard to make out at this distance—calls, “You should’ve been on the rifle team at Penn. Back then, the parties were jolly!”

“Those days, it was anything goes!” one of the other men adds.

“You mean anything went!” another cries. “Straight down the gullet!”

That man lets out a deep laugh before remembering where he is and lowering his voice.

My own father, on the outer edge of the group, coughs and closes his eyes before turning to glance at the clock in the hall. Even before he was named to the bench, he took Prohibition seriously.

Though no one else seems to. We’re only a few weeks away from 1928, and the Temperance ladies love to crow about how the capital city has been dry for a decade. Yet as far as I can tell, the liquor here never stopped flowing. In alleyways, men drink grain alcohol from brown bottles, and at society dinners, bow-tied waiters pour glasses of imported champagne. The wealthy hoard bottles in their cellars, insisting it was all bought before the laws changed, and everyone—rich, poor, and in between—drinks in speakeasies across the city seven nights a week. Everyone but seminary girls.

Well. Officially.

It’s true that liquor has penetrated the school walls. Sometimes a girl will get hold of a bottle of bathtub gin from a brother or a sweetheart and pass it around her dorm room, while a circle of us settles on the floor with our skirts tucked under our knees, trading sips from the foul-smelling bottle until we’ve stopped wrinkling our noses and begun laughing ourselves silly.

“You don’t really think Trixie took it, do you?” asks another girl just as my mother glances up from her group of friends, stifling a yawn and trying to catch my eye. I look away quickly. “What would she do with one earring?”

“What does Trixie do with anything?” Milly shrugs.

“Never mind Trixie,” I say. Trixie’s indeed been known to steal things, for reasons that have never been clear to anyone except her, and Clara did notice that she’s been acting strange tonight. Still, Trixie hasn’t given us any reason to suspect her of stealing anything this time. “The simplest explanation is that it fell out of Elizabeth’s ear, and in my experience, simple explanations most often suffice. Let’s spread out, everyone. Have a close look at the rug. The blue stones should stand out easily enough.”

I start toward the middle of the room, carefully turning my back on my mother and moving toward the corner where Mrs. Rose and Trixie are talking. Trixie is holding her hands out in front of her, pleading.

“It has to be tonight,” Trixie says. I slow my pace, casting my eyes at the ground so they won’t notice me listening. “I can’t stay there, not if…”

Mrs. Rose interrupts her. “It’ll be fine, Trixie.”

“But what if she—”

That’s all I hear before the gunshot rings out.

THE SOUND ECHOES FROM ONE SIDE OF THE NARROW ROOM TO the other. Sluggish, as though it’s dragging through water.

All around us, people have frozen, mouths dropping open. Conversations stopped mid-word. A woman gasps into the silence.

Milly’s gone stiff, too, but Clara’s eyes are darting around the room, racing toward the windows and then coming back to me. Following me as I run.

And I am. Running.

The sound came from the side of the building that faces the alley. The same window I’d pressed my forehead against minutes ago.

I’m the fastest girl at the seminary. It’s why I’m captain of the basketball team. That, and because I’m the only one the other girls will follow during drills.

Forward, back. Jump! Forward, back. Jump!

It’s the drills that echo in my mind as I reach the widest window. When I peer into the darkness, I see movement again. Whoever’s down there is running.

I stretch up onto my toes, trying to see their face.

“Get away from the windows!” a man bellows behind me. “You! Get back!”

Someone’s at my side. Clara. “Did you see anything?” she whispers, urgent.

“I think there’s a…”

Before I can say more, a hand closes on my arm above the elbow, jerking me back.

Milly. She’s gotten me halfway across the room before I can even try to resist. The partygoers have huddled into little groups, as though clustering close will protect them. No one seems to know where to look or what to do.

“You heard Trixie’s father,” Milly murmurs in my ear. “It isn’t safe, not with guns out there.”

Then a glass shatters, and there’s a shout, high and shrill. “This’ll be something to do with you, and we all know it!”

More gasps fill the room, the quiet stillness broken.

Shards from a broken punch glass lie on the ground beside Miss Parker’s feet, and she scowls harder than usual, swaying on her low gray heels.

She’s pointing at Mrs. Rose.

“Everyone knows the sort you spend your time with.” Miss Parker spits the words out. “It’s your low-life friends out there, isn’t it? Gangsters, or worse!”

That word, gangsters, earns more gasps, and the huddled groups burst into frantic conversation, fear dissolving into anger and blame.

All night, our teachers have been lingering in the corners of the room, talking in low voices. This party is meant to be given by the parents for the faculty, but the parents here tend to view teachers in much the way they view the aproned maids lingering around the edges of the room. They don’t see Mrs. Rose as much more, either, exalted as her headmistress title must be.

She’s standing with her back to the windows, only a few feet from where I was when Milly pulled me back. She’s watching Miss Parker. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mrs. Rose struck dumb.

No one speaks as the parents stare at her with unusually open dislike. The teachers keep silent. Even the girls are gazing at their feet.

My own anger surges. I don’t know what happened in the alley, but I know these people don’t understand how vital Mrs. Rose is to the seminary. To us.

“I’m quite sure there’s no danger,” I say.

And every head in the room swivels to me.

I hadn’t meant my voice to carry so far. Milly’s always telling me to be cautious. That something about the way I speak tends to make people listen, whether I want them to or not.

But it’s too late for that. I draw in a breath and add, “That sound was likely from a passing automobile.”

I said it to calm the room, but I regret it in the same instant, because the falsehood seems to work immediately, and better than I intended. The worried creases on the adults’ faces have already begun to smooth.

They don’t know about the figure I saw outside, running.

They don’t understand that we all need to get out of this library. Immediately.

Mrs. Rose steps into the center of the room. “Thank you, Miss Pound, I agree with your assessment. Let’s all progress into the grand hall for a change of scenery. Lucy, if you’d be so good as to inform the kitchen, and please ask Anderson to telephone the police. An unfortunate motorist may be in need of assistance.”

Lucy’s already moving, her pressed apron swishing as she hurries through the door. Sensing, I suspect, as Mrs. Rose seems to, that my “assessment” was entirely incorrect, and that the urgency is far greater than either of our tones would convey.

The crowd follows Mrs. Rose out of the library, their murmurs growing louder as they cast nervous glances back toward the windows.

“Many apologies, ladies and gentlemen.” Mr. Farrel clears his throat as he walks beside Miss Parker. Her lips are pressed tightly together, and shame is slowly writing its way across her wrinkled forehead. “Our good Miss Parker isn’t quite herself this evening. She hopes you’ll excuse her as she goes to rest until she’s feeling better.”

“I’ll go speak to the police,” my father says as he passes through, buttoning his jacket over his waistcoat. When he spots me, he leans in for a whisper. “Stay inside, Gertie. It isn’t safe to go looking around tonight.”

“I wasn’t planning to go look around at anything,” I say, though I’m longing to do precisely that.

A half-dozen men move toward the staircase to accompany my father. “Think there’s any truth to it?” one of them mutters. “Does she associate with the criminal element?”

“With that woman, anything’s possible,” someone mutters in reply.

Mrs. Rose is standing opposite us in the grand hall, speaking in a low voice to one of the servants. If she heard the men talking, she doesn’t give any sign of it. But then, I’ve never been able to tell what she’s thinking.

I still try, though. Every morning, I give it my very best attempt.

I can’t remember when, exactly, my visits to Mrs. Rose became a daily occurrence. At first I only went once a week. As editor of the student newspaper, I’m expected to review each edition with her before publication. We’ve found that it doesn’t take us long to dispense with that, though, as there’s only so much to say about upcoming dances, fawning reviews of National Theatre performances we’ve all already seen, and poetry about dandelions composed by eager freshmen.

The conversations that come after business is over are far more interesting.

Every morning, I find Mrs. Rose in the same spot, behind her desk, writing letters, while Lucy sets a fresh pot of tea by the fireplace. Mrs. Rose starts each visit by thanking her, taking off her glasses, and rubbing the bridge of her nose before turning her smile to me. The tiny lines around her eyes are always tired, but the eyes themselves are bright and quick.

When we sit by the fire together, I can talk about absolutely anything. My friends. My family. Politics, and basketball, and the past, and the future. Until I met Mrs. Rose, I never knew I had so much to say about the future.

She asks me questions, too, in her soft, easy manner, about what I dream of doing someday, should circumstances ever permit it. To hear Mrs. Rose talk, circumstances can permit quite a lot.

I’ve tried to tell her it isn’t so simple. My future’s already laid out. I’ll find a husband next winter, during my debutante year. There will be engagement parties and a wedding at the National Cathedral, with red and white carnations. My mother’s own wedding wasn’t in the proper season for them, and for years she’s told me about all the carnations I’ll have, without once asking how I felt about carnations.

And after that… that’s the trouble. I can’t imagine anything after. My mother’s plans stop with the carnations.

I suppose I’ll use my grand education at the best girls’ schools in the city to manage my household, as my mother has. To host dinners for the wives of husbands as important as my own. To send my children to the very best schools, so they can become imitations o. . .