Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family's Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,' he said.

Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.

After Henry's treatment of her she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

As she always did on any really important day, Penelope Hayes wore red.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams. The girls of 1929.