Tender is the Night (1934)
F. Scott Fitzgerald

     With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money.  Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides.   Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend.  She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house, and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns.   She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a traveling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes -- bought all these things not a bit like a high class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance, but with an entirely different point of view.  Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil.  For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half- breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors--these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole and, as the whole system swayed and thundered onward, it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze.  She illustrated very simple principles, containing herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.

[F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night.  New York: Scribner's , 1934.]