It is interesting to know

& Reading

The passage is taken from the novel Tender is the Night by the American writer, F Scott Fitzgerald, which was published in 1934. Read the passage about Nicole’s shopping trip.

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 coloured beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarves, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house, and three yards of some new cloth the colour of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets from Hermes. Nicole was the product of much hard work. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and crossed the continent to California; in factories men mixed toothpaste in vats and girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked hard at the local store on Christmas Eve; Indians worked on Brazilian coffee plantations – these were some of the people who contributed to Nicole’s wealth and, as the whole system swayed and thundered onward, it gave a rosy colour to such processes of hers as wholesale buying.