Fiends Read Online Free PDF Page B

areas."
    Frivolous? Okay, forget about the full-length mink coat, the scholarship, the wardrobe, the pretty good diamond jewelry—it was the opportunity for travel that mattered so much, to Marjory if not to Enid, and the high-type men, unmarried men, she'd be introduced to. Entertainers, advertising executives, Wall Streeters, even men who didn't have to work because they had so much money but were still serious about their lives, financed expeditions or invented things or got appointed ambassador to Greece. The kind of man Enid deserved, someone Marjory could take pride in as a brother-in-law, knowing in her heart, although she was only sixteen, that she didn't stand a cut dog's chance of ever landing anybody decent herself. Uh-uh, rule that out: not with her superstructure and big thighs.
    So Enid wouldn't enter the Miss Tennessee Pageant, which of course led straight to Atlantic City and even more prestige, as Miss America (it was no secret that the judges up there doted on Southern women). Marjory was just able to bear this frustration, but she hadn't given up yet on another crucial promotion. Their house in Sublimity was free and clear, except for some piddling taxes they were only a year behind on. But the house was worth twenty thousand dollars, according to a local real estate agent Marjory consulted. Nashville was booming; Sublimity was practically a suburb now, and they were putting up tract houses not two miles down the road. Marjory had calculated that they could live for two years in Paris, France, on twenty thousand dollars, where Enid, by virtue of her proven talent, would be admitted to whichever of several art schools she chose to attend and study with the finest portrait painters in Europe. Rich people were lining up over there to be immortalized in oils. The president of Vanderbilt University was having his portrait done now, by an artist from New York whose fee was three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars! If Enid only painted one portrait a month, that came out to be—
    Enid wouldn't hear of selling the house. She thought it would be foolish to move to Paris and live off their capital when she already had an offer to go to work for $125 a week, plus benefits, in the art department of Curtis Sewell and Wainwright, Nashville's heavyweight ad agency. With that much security, then she could afford to paint portraits in her spare time, a potentially profitable hobby that appealed to her.
    "Marjory," Enid had explained patiently, the last few times Marjory had hurled Paris in her face, "it sounds perfectly lovely and of course I've always dreamed of someday visiting the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, what girl hasn't? I know you mean well, hon, but don't you see? It's all 'pie in the sky.'" Sighing deeply, which Enid did so well it could bring tears to a creditor's eyes, she went on. "Mama and daddy would revolve in their graves, Marjory, if I let go of the house, unless of course it was a life-or-death situation—"
    "Well, it is your life we're talking about, and I wish you'd try to understand that. You can be a big shot or a little shot, Enid. It's the big shots who study art in Paris."
    "Now, how many times did we hear daddy say that the worst thing you can do is trade your birthright for 'pie in the sky'? Speaking of big shots, Half-uncle Averill mortgaged his home and cashed all of his saving bonds just to get hold of that fried-chicken franchise, and do you know what?"
    "Yeh, I know. It's terrible fried chicken, and the sheriffs at his door." Enid looked well satisfied; all would-be entrepreneurs were on trial, and she had just forced a confession from her guilty sister.
    "That will never happen to us. Because we have a paid-up roof over our heads, which is our most valuable material asset. Our Rock of Gibraltar. See, I'm thinking about you, Marjory, and not just myself. I want to guarantee you the opportunity to finish college, like I did, so that you'll always have a vocation. I'm responsible