More than the curlers some of the women seemed constantly to have in their hair in preparation for some great event -- a ball, one would think -- that never came to pass; more than the way most women's faces not only were never made up during the day, but seemed scraped, bleached, and, with their plucked eyebrows, scarily masklike; more than all that it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding, adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access, and boys no conception.