She purchases boots to go with her stockings, buys fitted kid gloves, reads expensive magazines while lunching at a high-class restaurant, and ends her day sharing chocolates with a fellow theatre goer.

Chopin chose to write for Vogue because the magazine was uncharacteristically "fearless and truthful" for the 1890s in its depiction of women and their lives.

Vogue published these stories so earnestly that, Toth suggests, it gave Chopin the decidedly false impression that American reviewers would be accepting of her coming scandalous The Awakening.

[1] Allen Stein argues that serpentine silk stockings represent the empty consumerism that Mrs. Sommers uses to try to escape her life.

But the temptation proves too much and she succumbs to the "mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility"—words which prefigure Edna Pontellier in Chopin's later novel The Awakening.