sat in the train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.
***** "PETTING" On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon, the "petting party." None of the Victorian mothers--and most of the mothers were Victorian--had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.

"Servant-girls are that way," says Mrs.Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter.

"They are kissed first and proposed to afterward." But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P.D.( she is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.
Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down.

But he never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.
Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums down-stairs...

they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting.