If Doreen is the slinky, glamorous southern girl, whose college is very fashion conscious (the girls have pocketbook covers made to match all their dresses), Betsy is the import from Kansas who innocently tells a producer about male and female corn. Ironically, it is Betsy who has her hair cut and is made into a cover girl. She and Doreen appear headed for different kinds of success, one coming from innocence and work, the other from using her beauty to trap men, like Lenny, the disc jockey with the white bearskin rug and the apartment filled with Indian rugs. Esther/Elly represents the New England "Yankee" girl, one with extraordinary perceptions. She is also the only girl of the lot who does not seem able to fit into a glamorous role. The other girls fit some "image," but Esther, because of the insights that she is sharing with the reader, slips in and out of an ugly duckling state. She tells us she is five-foot-ten, but we never see her as a tall, attractive or sensitive contest winner because she seems to feel she is deficient — when compared to Doreen and Betsy.
Esther says that she likes "looking on at other people in crucial situations." Is she creating a crucial situation, in part, for herself so she can examine it? Or is it that since she has been "studying and reading and writing and working like mad" all her life, she doesn't know how to accept a sociable, much less a fashionable role? The successful Jay Cee tries to encourage Esther to follow her as a role model because the homely but competent editor knows all the "quality writers"; she tells Esther to "learn French and German and probably several other languages." This reminds Esther of her dilemma with physics and chemistry, and after that story, the reader wonders if Esther really does "love school." Perhaps she secretly wants to be sexy like Doreen — or perhaps naively innocent like Betsy.
