Esther decides on another day that she will ignore several Ladies Day–scheduled functions in order to lounge in bed and later spend time in Central Park. Jay Cee, however, calls and asks Esther to come to the office, where she talks very frankly with her about preparations she'll need to make if she wants to become a New York editor. Esther spends the rest of the morning reading manuscripts at the office, and then catches up with the other contest winners for a banquet. At the banquet, she gorges on caviar, followed by crabmeat salad. At a movie premier later in the afternoon, she begins feeling ill and catches a cab home with Betsy, another contest winner who is as wholesome as Doreen is audacious. Back at the Amazon, she is deathly ill and learns later that all of the contest winners at the banquet ended up with grave food poisoning from the crabmeat salad.
As she is recovering from the food poisoning, she gets a call from Constantin, a UN simultaneous interpreter who is acquainted with Mrs. Willard, Buddy Willard's mother. Esther goes out with Constantin to an ethnic restaurant and meets other fascinating people, who by their accomplishments make her feel her own inadequacy. She plans to seduce Constantin, reveling in the thought of losing her virginity to an acquaintance of Buddy Willard's mother, but they end up merely sleeping next to each other in his apartment.
As the internship ends, Esther is feeling more and more disjointed and unable to enjoy her experiences in New York. During a photo shoot for the magazine, she is unable to hold her artificial smile, and begins weeping openly. Her final night in the city, she goes on a date with Marco, a woman-hater who begins the evening by giving her a diamond stickpin, and later assaults her. He demands she return his diamond, which was in her handbag; the handbag flew out of her hands and landed somewhere in the mud during the assault. She leaves Marco on his hands and knees in the mud, looking for his diamond. She returns to her hotel room and, one by one, drops her clothes and undergarments out of the window of her room.
