Our world is full of pretenders; stupid people acting smart, white people acting black, ignorant people acting as the educated. This issue is touched in Dorothy Parker's "The Standard of Living", the main characters, two young women named Annabel and Midge, fall into this catagory. The two young middle-class women act as if they are rich, this is shown to us by Parker through an ironic game that the girls play. Using the two young …showed first 75 words of 628 total…

…showed last 75 words of 628 total…to grow. The more we want, the more power we give to our greed. Nobody wants to look "conspicuous and cheap and charming," that is why Parker uses this, along with other descriptions like it to describe the girls so we wouldn't want to be like them. Upon completion of the short story, I was left wondering "If they see a million dollar estate they like, how much money will they be 'left with' then?"