Laura is sitting alone playing with her glass collection. When she hears Amanda ascending the stairs, she immediately hides the collection and sits before the typing chart pretending to study it. Amanda comes in and theatrically drops her gloves on the floor. When Laura asks her what is wrong, Amanda accuses her of deception. Amanda tells Laura that she was by the business school in order to inquire about Laura’s progress. It was then that she found out that Laura had not been attending school. Amanda is depressed about losing the fifty dollars tuition and about Laura’s future. Laura explains that on the day she was supposed to take her first speed test in typing, she became sick and threw up on the floor. Since then she has been pretending to go to school, but instead she has been going to the museums and to the bird houses in the zoo and to a big glass house where they “raise the tropical flowers.”
Amanda wonders what will then happen to a girl who can’t work and who has no gentlemen callers. She then wonders if Laura has ever liked a boy. Laura tells about a boy in high school named Jim with whom she was infatuated. He used to call her “blue roses” because she had had pleurosis, which he thought sounded like “blue roses.” Amanda then decides that Laura must get married. Laura protests that she is a cripple, but Amanda refuses to allow Laura to use that word and insists that all Laura needs to do is to develop charm.
