Des Moines, 1928

Not yet known as a major center of the Insurance industry, Des Moines in 1928 was prosperous and provincial.

Clean and bland.

Stifling, for a respectable woman with ambition. Helen worked as a banker's secretary for two summers before she graduated from college and lived on her own in a cramped airless rooming house. There may have been other girls she knew in the city, girls from Grinnell College or even from Malvern, plump, boisterous girls, who had not been sensitive or conscientious in school, as she was--yet here, in the city, they were successful, far more than she. They were daring, they were glamorous. She was always tired and had already begun to get those tense lines about the mouth that marked her mother's face.

Nevertheless, she made friends here. Nancy, her roommate, the girl with the shocking mouth, who smoked cigarettes, yet had a complete set of Dickens crammed into a shelf at the end of her bed. It was different, living in the city, on her own, eating in delis, eating lots of bread and fruit because those were the foods that didn't take any preparation and could be stored under the bed. And she was young enough not to worry that this would become permanent.

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