Lacy

The party was getting noisier by the minute.

Lacy Jarrett Whitehall watched it with an air of total withdrawal. All that wild jazz, the kicky dancing, the bathtub gin flowing like water as it was passed from sloshing glass to teacup. She wasn't really as much a participant as she was an onlooker. It made her feel alive to watch other people enjoying themselves. Lacy hadn't felt alive in a long time.

Many of the neighbors were elderly people, and she suffered a pang of conscience at what, to them, must have seemed like licentious behavior.The Charleston was considered a vulgar dance by the older generation. Jazz, they said, was decadent. Ladies smoked in public and swore—and some actually wore their stockings rolled to just below the kneecap.They wore galoshes, unfastened, so that they flapped when they walked—hence the name given to the new generation: flappers. Shocking behavior to a society that had only since the war come out of the Victorian Age.The war had changed everything. Even now, four years after the armistice, people were still recovering from the horror of it. Some had never recovered. Some never would.

In the other room, laughing cou ... read full excerpt from Lacy ebook