Two young women, Annabel and Midge, fantasize about wealth and luxury while living modestly. They play a game imagining what they’d buy if they inherited a million dollars, revealing their shallow values and materialistic dreams. Their fantasies are disrupted when they admire a pearl necklace in a store, only to learn its exorbitant price far exceeds their imagined wealth. A satirical story that critiques superficial aspirations and the illusion of wealth.
“Annabel and Midge came out of the tearoom with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched, as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butterfats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries, limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid, not yet liquid, like salve that has been left in the sun. They chose no other sort of food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.”