Successful Love

Susan Calhoun thought that Daddy was an old dear, the darlingest dear, although he did make sour remarks sometimes. But it was Mummy who was really keen. She was one in a million, she really was, she understood what it was to be a girl in 1950. Daddums was very sweet too, the soul of kindness, and Mummy would convince him that they would not be in the least mistaken or ill-advised to let their quite attractive daughter go to art school in New York and live in New York City instead of going to college. She was just seventeen, but seventeen was not the bib-and-diaper stage some parents thought it was. She was older than seventeen in the ways of a woman and the world which was more important than anything else for a woman to be if she was a girl. Something was definitely wrong with career girls and career women.

Daddy liked to read books a lot, and he was very clever, very sophisticated, like New Yorker cartoons, which made you smile, not laugh, but he certainly did not want her to be a bookworm even if he did want her to go to college. She had overheard by accident what he had said when Mummy first talked to him about her going to art school and living in New York City: Daddums had said that he would have been less surprised if Mother had proposed that Susan become a deep-sea diver or a flagpole sitter, for he had been under the impression that she probably thought Van Gogh was a foreign car, like the Rolls Royce. She did too know who Van Gogh was, he had cut his ear off because of a beautiful girl, and the lives of the painters were truly fascinating as the teacher said in the art history course at Miss Fletcher's last year. Mother had paused before telling Daddy that Susan probably wanted to have an affair. How had Mother guessed? She was certainly clever and keen, but since the affair was in the future, how had she guessed? Mother's remark left Daddy speechless then, which was the way he always was just before he became dreadfully sarcastic. "Sometimes you make me feel just as I feel when I read the Sunday edition of The New York Times," Daddy said then, "contemplating a world I never made, nor desired, nor like, nor trust, and about which no one has ever consulted me." Mother said then, trying her hardest to be diplomatic, "Roger, do be patient with me, I've given Susan a good deal of thought. She is a natural lovable and loving child and she is going to have an affair no matter what we do. All that we can do is to keep her from becoming so serious that the affair ends in a premature marriage, as it will tend to because the child is the soul of respectability: she would certainly get married too soon if she were not free of the sense of respectability which living at home made unavoidable." And when Daddy wanted to know precisely why a young lady of seventeen could not have an affair at college as well as at art school in New York City and particularly since it seemed to be quite customary among many college girls, Mother explained to him that girls at college lived in a community almost as much as they did at home, and Susan's sense of the opinion of other girls might lead to the same disastrous result, since she clearly was an innocent old-fashioned girl.

Susan did not think she was quite as innocent as Mummy thought she was, she did not think she was at all old-fashioned, quite the contrary: and she was absolutely positively certain that she would not rush into marriage. She was going to see life first, and be a woman of the world. But what Mother probably meant was that she was not shrewd, as Mother truly was, nor clever, like Daddums, but she did not want to be: if you thought too much about things, you never had any fun.

Janet Ross's father was just like Mother, he understood what it was like to be a girl in 1950; he took Janet for a drive during Xmas week when she was home from her first term at Fairfield and told her that it would be all right for her to have an affair now, if she knew how to handle it, but did she? Janet's mother was just the opposite. She was a horror from way back, a real pain. She told Janet that she ought not to have an affair even if a lot of the other girls did have affairs, or just because they did. If one really felt like that, one ought to get married, and until one felt like that, one ought not to get married and spoil something which should be inherently beautiful and meaningful. Honestly! How could anyone think and talk like that in 1950! Janet did not tell her mother that she had already had a perfectly glorious affair, and a very beautiful one too, and the man was beautiful too and also meaningful. But her mother found out and wrote her a perfectly awful letter about how she had been seen registering in a New York hotel with a man and what would people think of her and her brothers and sisters: honestly: as if anyone gave a hoot. No man who had not lost his marbles expected his bride to be a virgin in 1950, not after the way he had been playing around before getting ready to march up the aisle with a member of the fair sex.

And Marion Campbell's father had been like Janet's mother, except worse, when Marion brought her young man for a visit to their summer place on the Cape. Nothing had been going on, absolutely nothing, except a little heavy necking, but Papa had been quite impossible; he had shouted at Marion right in front of her young man that she seemed to think her father's house was a third-rate hotel. It was monstrous: and Janet's father was an art critic, too, and still did not know that he was behaving as if we were still in the middle ages. Marion and the young man had been secretly engaged too; it was broken off in the fall, but no one knew that then: misere!

• • •

Nancy Calhoun had given a good deal of patient thought to her daughter Susan who was seventeen and very pretty and entirely an infant. Nancy wanted to be a more intelligent mother than other wealthy doting parents. Now was the time to be intelligent, now that Susan wanted to go to live in New York City, wanted to live either in her own apartment or in an apartment with other girls whom she know slightly. She also wanted to go to art school or some kind of school: it was clearly a pretext, but Susan must not perceive that her pretense was transparent.

Susan was an only child. She had always been more of a baby than most children, and perhaps she had been babied too much, but it was too late now to brood about that. She had been terrified by her parents' absence as a child, terrified however brief their departure, however great her attachment to the servants. So Susan's desire to live in New York City could mean only one thing, that her beautiful darling lamb of a daughter wanted to have an affair. She had said last summer, surprising her mother with an attitude wholly unlike the child, the necking did get very boring very soon. But Nancy had not expected the next stage so very soon.

In 1950 the right kind of affair would not hurt Susan and might help her very much: provided she learned to take care of herself and did not take the affair too seriously. Which would probably occur if she stayed at home and had an affair with one of the boys who comprised the local talent and whom Nancy had been at pains to scrutinize sharply.

The dear child had a date with herself, a date which she would not keep if caught in the toils and throes of a premature marriage (which was likely enough), and premature motherhood, her own misfortune. Motherhood was even more likely, for Susan would turn to motherhood too soon when astonished and disappointed that the bliss of the honeymoon did not persist forever and ever.

It would be best for her to have a few affairs. Then she would be able to keep her date with herself, then when she knew what men were like, having seen enough of them, when she knew what she wanted in a man because she had been close enough to know how it was a round-the-clock weeklong yearlong lifelong problem, not a matter of good manners and a glib tongue, persiflage and flirtation, or even deftness in the bedroom.

Roger would have to be persuaded. The best persuasion would be to present Susan's departure as a trial which might be quickly ended if it proved unwise. The dear man assented, in the end, to all his wife's desires and decisions; they were natural phenomena to him like summer, the animals in the zoo, the behavior of the stock market and the necessity of suburban commuting. Like all strangers, like all tourists, he expected the behavior only a native or a veteran needed. And like all fathers and husbands, he insisted upon the masquerade of deference to his paternal position without any prior or regular attentiveness ... it was really tiresome. But Roger was entitled to his foibles and follies like everyone else. Dear Roger! Had there ever been a man so intelligent, clever, and well-educated, yet so unworldly, so foolish, so much the noble savage in the wickedness of civilization?

Intent and intense as Susan had been on living in New York City, it was not at all probable that she had already chosen her young man. It was far more likely that she had chosen the great city to provide the young man, a plentitude of young men. It was best that it should be so. There would be so much chance and so little necessity in Susan's choice of a husband that the simple lamb could hardly help but benefit by being swamped in variety. It was just barely possible that the dear child had already yielded to one of the young men who had been taking her to dances during the past year. And this was precisely the key to the child: that it might be true, she had surrendered, and there was no sign or difference whatever. It showed what she was really like; her dear darling daughter was simple and naive, innocent and old-fashioned, eminently respectable, profoundly conventional. Her respectability was her weakness, the worst part of her innocence. Her innocence was partly impatience: she was impetuous too as only the innocent are. If anything would protect Susan from her own impetuous innocence, it was the freedom and the anonymity of New York: would protect her by giving her, to be blunt about it, sexual satisfaction on a regular basis! She could not have this arrangement with complete impunity in a suburb or at a school in a small town.

• • •

Roger Calhoun thought that his wife was probably right about Susan. Whether or not she was, he was certainly wrong: since as a young man he had known nothing of the young lady of the era of his youth, he certainly knew nothing whatever now about what it was like to be a young lady in 1950. Nancy's point of view impinged upon him as cold-blooded (continued overleaf) and calculating, but perhaps it was merely her tone, or merely his paternal sentimentality. Still and all, it was always all too easy to be too cold-blooded, calculating, and rational about questions of the heart. But was it a question of the heart, regarded in Nancy's light?

It was hardly a year since, while having a quiet drink at the club with Ben Stanton, that Ralph Cox had come over and asked both of them just exactly what one did when one's daughter began to sleep with innumerable young men? Ben who had two sons and three daughters answered immediately that one did nothing: what could one do? Ralph Cox went off shaking his head, silent. Ben had spoken to them of his nephew Arthur who was nothing if not a typical young man. He worked at being typical. Now as it happened Arthur had recently been on a week-end house party with his sister and in the midst of it, carelessly, he had entered the wrong bedroom to find his sister in flagrante delicto (flagrantly delighted! said Ben caustically) with a young man who was a good friend of Arthur's. "Oh, I beg your pardon!" Arthur had said, mortified, and turned and shut the bedroom door carefully and quietly. Questioned by his uncle, Arthur had said in an offhand way that no gentleman would act otherwise. When Ben remained dissatisfied, his nephew added that he himself had successfully pursued the sisters of his friends: protest would be preposterous and no one ever felt moved to protest: this was not the nineteenth century. One chap had been furious because his sister had been left on the hook by her young man who was too tired and too drunk. The brother requested the tired young man to join his sister in her bedroom, which showed clearly the conception of family duty and honor which prevailed. "We can't halt the course of history," Ben had concluded, which was precisely his resigned comment when Roosevelt had been elected for the third and the fourth time. His tone was a little grandiloquent, but Roger recognized that the cause was the same: he was equally disturbed by the New Deal and the dalliance of his daughters. He had also remarked to Roger that when they had known youth, early in the twentieth century, there had been nice girls and bad girls: now the double standard had been succeeded by open house. A young lady was afraid to hurt the young man's feelings by refusing to jump into bed with him: she had only one justifiable and acceptable reason for refusing, the fact that she was jumping into bed with some other young man.

Nancy was probably right about Susan. Nancy was not at all unconventional and she would not advocate unconventional behavior on Susan's part. She was profoundly practical and her proposal had a practical purpose: his middle-aged feelings must be mistaken: it was much like the strangeness which had shocked him most of all the previous summer when, reading in his study, he had heard Susan at midnight with her beau on the porch swing, the two of them first licking ice cream cones, then beginning to spoon with no prelude of flirtation as if the spooning were part of a mechanical routine.

"Golly, you have a beautiful pair of knockers!" the young man declared very soon, his utterance inspired by the concreteness of immediate experience. A beautiful pair of knockers was a delightful phrase, in a way; Roger would have been delighted by it in a novel, as he knew very well. When a second beau during the same week told his daughter that she had quite a milk fund, he argued with himself that it was merely a question of speech. Among the young men of his own generation, purity of speech had been directly connected with morbidity of feeling. He had misgivings about Susan's being generous and intimate with more than one man, but it was ridiculous to expect her to be fixed upon her true love at fifteen. Doubtless the child thought of herself as trying to be fair and impartial!

At the beginning of that summer Roger Calhoun had been unable to imagine what the young people found to converse about, assuming that conversation ever occurred. "Hi!" said the young man when he arrived. "Hi!" said Susan. When the young man departed, he said: "So long," and Susan chirped: "See you!" Who would have believed that the two had been intimate all evening, concerned with beautiful knockers and prolonged kisses?

After Roger had listened for the first time to his daughter and her beau on the porch swing, he had apologized to her for listening. Susan answered him that she did not mind in the least, which at once reassured and astonished him. He had continued to listen, uneasy about eavesdropping. But his daughter's disavowal supported the curiosity which astonishment awakened and perplexity intensified in him. "You send me," one of Susan's four beaux avowed on a brilliant breathless summer night. "And you, kind sir, send me," Susan responded sweetly. "Honestly, I get a big kick out of you." Sometimes there was a mock clash of egos: taunting and teasing preceded the comparative silence of petting: "You are a complete cluck," Susan declared. "So are you," her witty knight countered. "No, I am not," Susan said with heat. "Then neither am I," the young man replied in a tone of greater heat which suggested a conviction of his own brilliance of wit and repartee.

During the course of the summer, the conversation had grown more extended and complex. The young man arrived with jokes as with bouquets or boxes of candy. "Wait until you hear this one," the young man said, impatient and triumphant. "Don't keep me suspended," the beautiful Susan answered. "Man goes into hotel," the beau began, "clerk asks: 'Want a room with running water?' 'No, I never sleep with Indians!' says the man." Susan and her young man were then mastered by convulsions of mirth. The theme of the hotel was popular. "Beautiful lady," said the young man, "arrives at a hotel. Says to desk clerk: 'I would like a room and a bath.' 'You can have a room,' says the clerk, 'but, lady, you will have to bathe yourself!' " Susan was overwhelmed, the patient perplexed father felt that he must entertain the possibility of the wrongness of his point of view. He had soon remarked that Susan was most amused when a young lady was a leading character in the story: it was then that she was most likely to declare that the story was not only delirious, but devastating. "You just murder me!" she said on the eve of Labor Day in the course of entertaining the most comical of her young men.

Roger Calhoun concluded that his feelings were foolish. He was what he had been, a romantic snob. His youth had been paralyzed by tormented shyness. He had shuddered, adoring the blessed damozel, long since out-moded: if he let himself go his middle-aged mind would give way to the expectation that Susan's suitors would arrive on horseback, knights in mail and clanking armor, armed with ardent and courtly poems in the best chivalric modes. He had been sixteen when he first regretted that knighthood was in flower no more; and now, long past fifty, his daughter's angelic countenance, angelic and cherubic because she was simple and naive, revived the mores of his adolescent reveries in which the blessed damozel had looked down from an azure distance, infinite and unattainable, at the purity and seriousness, the devotion and dedication of a very shy young man.

• • •

The idea of going to art school in New York City was quite definitely enchanting to Susan Calhoun. She knew almost nothing about painting, but she did like to look at paintings, it was most enjoyable. But she was certainly intrigued with the prospect of knowing painters, to judge by what she had heard about an artist's life. Artists were interesting people, very clever and amusing, and had interesting parties, and they knew that making love was one of the most important things in life, but they were not stupid and stuffy about it. It must be quite enthralling to sit in a life class when a girl model posed in the nude: how did a girl feel when for the first time she posed in the beautiful altogether in front of so many men who were looking straight at her? She was sure that she herself would be quite embarrassed merely when she was just a student in a life class and a girl stood nude in front of the class.

Some people were very strange. Gloria's cousin Phoebe had shocked her whole family and everyone at school when she offered to pose in the nude in the art class one day when the model did not arrive. Gloria said that Phoebe said that you get used to it almost immediately, right after the first five minutes, because you see that you might just as well be an old wornout sofa to everyone staring at you. Phoebe did get used to the nude so quickly that she lost interest and decided to become a nurse, (continued on page 32) Successful Love (continued from page 16) shocking her family still more, but soon after Phoebe had her first affair with a middle-aged man of thirty-eight, old enough to be her grandfather, and forgot all about modeling and nursing. Phoebe told Gloria that sex was not all it was cracked up to be. It was quite enjoyable but nothing terrific or stupendous. But Phoebe changed her mind very rapidly when she had her second affair, this time with a man who practically had one shoulder in the grave, but he was very experienced, Phoebe told Gloria, her whole belly shook with delicious quivers and shivers, and she hardly knew just what she was doing. Gloria said that Phoebe said that the best thing in a way was that after making love like that you did not think of sex for the next few days at least and you felt good at the same time, very good about everything, and patient, and full of energy.

Phoebe was obsessed with sex and when Susan heard about Phoebe's experiences, she felt obsessed with sex, too, so it was definitely something if Phoebe did not think of sex at all for several days because she usually thought of nothing else. Some girls at school said that Phoebe was a nympho, and it was incredible that any girl not a nympho should let a man as old and decrepit as that put his hands on her, to say nothing of Phoebe's great enthusiasm about him. She said to Gloria quite seriously that he played her like a piano, she was not joking at all: that was how Phoebe had met him: piano lessons. He was a pianist and Phoebe claimed that only a man of that age had the experience to teach you while the men of your own age are just jackrabbits, it's all over practically before you've begun to respond. Personally Susan herself would rather stay ignorant. She would probably vomit if a man more than thirty made love to her, the very idea disgusted her. But Phoebe said that young men knew as little as girls did, and you never found out anything from other girls at all the bull sessions at school: you did find out something about pleasing a man, but not about pleasing yourself: which was basically what a man wanted, believe it or not, and which gave all concerned the wonderful unbelievable feeling you never got from necking. Phoebe insisted that necking was nothing: it just made you nervous.

Susan just adored necking sometimes, no matter what Phoebe said. She sometimes had too much of it, but usually she liked it so much that she had had some pretty close escapes and nothing really important happened not because she stopped but because the boy stopped. That boy from the South had stopped and said it would be dishonorable not to stop and he had been so polite, he had said May I? before he even touched her each time, and the Lord knows he had taken so long to ask permission that she thought she would blow up, she was so excited by his kisses.

Susan was intensely piercingly bored with this having to stop: it was an awful nuisance. There were eight million human beings in New York City and it was hardly possible that she would not find at least one real and attractive man there willing to take her on. She would give herself exactly three months: if none of the painters at art school took an interest in her, she would go out and pick up the first truckdriver that whistled at her, and she would not tell him the facts to begin with because truckdrivers might be honorable like Southerners too.

• • •

Susan was installed in a New York apartment and at art school when the winter term began. The apartment was inhabited by Rita and Consuelo, two girls who were studying art and archeology at Columbia. They were five years older than Susan, which was the reason that Mother had chosen their apartment. They were highbrows, but nevertheless had an enormous number of dates.

Susan had never before existed in a state of such continual delight. The climax came after only a week at art school when Anthony Boyd who looked like a Greek god except with pitch-black hair asked her for lunch. She had been afraid that she might get impatient and get involved with her second choice since she had looked at Anthony Boyd directly in the face all the time in class but he never batted an eyelash at her while her second choice kept staring at her as if she were his dream of dreams, a cover girl or a Hollywood starlet.

"Why did you ask me to lunch, Mr. Boyd?" Susan asked in her most aloof tone when they were seated in the lunchroom to which he had taken her.

"Call me Tony," the young man said in a commanding tone, a tone which thrilled Susan.

"Tony," said Susan with a little effort, "tell me the reason that you selected me with all the beautiful girls and models right in front of your naked eyes."

"Do I have to have a reason?" said Tony. Since the chick had to be flattered, he had better not tell her that he had noticed her only because she had gaped at him, starry-eyed, all week long. "It's just natural: you're a girl, I'm a man, we have to eat or we'll starve, so we go to lunch and get acquainted."

He spoke in a gruff husky voice which was so cute and so attractive that Susan forgot the compliment which she had sought.

"I am glad that you did, anyway," said Susan, "whatever your reason may have been." She glowed, looking at his handsome face, and thinking he must have a strong physique, judging by the shoulders.

"Look, I told you," said Tony, "I had no reason. I'm not one of those guys who have to analyze everything all the time. I just keep doing what comes naturally and it certainly pays off. All that brainwork is a big waste of time. Guys who analyze the reasons for everything can't do anything else."

"I never liked reading much either," said Susan, feeling that Tony and she had much in common and felt that same way about life.

"I bet you didn't," said Tony with conviction. "It's the wallflowers who belong on the wall paper who get the overdeveloped brains: they're all fatheads with all their fancy talk."

Susan cherished this assertion as a compliment of a kind, for it meant that she was not a wallflower, although so far, technically, she might just as well have been.

"How about dinner dutch tonight?" Tony said at the entrance to the art school. Susan was afraid that she might seem too eager, but she was too delighted with Tony to refuse and too impatient to play the coquette: anyone would know that Tony did not fall for that sort of thing.

Susan soon saw Tony almost all the time, at lunch and at dinner too. He was not only very handsome and strong, but he had an absolute confidence in himself which Susan perceived was resented by the other students. They thought he was too cocky, they thought he was conceited, arrogant, and cheeky, but Susan adored these traits and thought that some of the others must just be jealous because Tony was a real man and very confident and very handsome and the most gifted student. He talked with a Tenth Avenue accent and he lived in a New York slum until drafted by the army. But the tough accent made him just like George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Garfield, Spencer Tracy, all the wonderful stars who played tough guy cabdrivers, mechanics, gunmen, and gangsters in the pictures. She had long worshiped them from afar; now she knew one of them in person, in the flesh.

Tony told Susan during the first week at dinner how he had come to be a painter. He always liked drawing, even as a kid in school, but until he was drafted it didn't occur to him that he might become a painter himself. At the army post in Kansas some other G.I. had won first prize and five thousand bucks in a big art show competition. The guy had been a serious painter until drafted, and had nothing else to do with the dough, what else was there to do with five thousand bucks, deep in the heart of Kansas, so he bought five thousand simoleons worth of war bonds. Which the commanding officer heard about, and when the C.O. heard that this well-heeled probably famous bozo was fighting the Axis mainly by peeling potatoes and acting as chauffeur for the Captain's laundry, he thought it was a disgrace to the army, and soon had him transferred to the war correspondents corps, where he diddled away for the duration drawing sketches of the scenes of war. The magic of being a painter astonished Tony: he had never seen anything like it.

"That's for me, I said to myself when I heard about it," he told Susan who did not really understand what he was saying, apart from his superb confidence and ambition. "As soon as I was let out of the army I took advantage of the G.I. (continued on page 36) Successful Love (continued from page 32) bill of rights, and jumped at the chance of getting to be a painter too. If that guy had the commanding officer kowtowing to him, I was going to be a painter too and get in on all the kowtowing. Besides, I really get a big kick out of painting, anyway. But if you're a painter you're a holy cow, you are nothing less than the cat's pajamas, you are it: you can go anywhere and do anything, no one cares where you come from or how much dough you don't have or if your family did not get a chance to be seasick on the Mayflower: you're an artist, so you're it: everyone thinks you're wonderful, and you can act like a dipso on a three-day binge, or a hipster all charged up: everyone says that it's just the artist's temperament. You need talent too, and the funny thing is that you get so interested sometimes in what you're doing, you don't make the most of the artist's temperament and hardly ever feel like going on a tear, the way that most guys felt most of the time in the service."

Susan felt let down by Tony's conclusion. What he said about the artist's temperament awakened her hope that as an artist he would not be impeded by a girl's lack of experience, which was not her fault.

• • •

Soon enough they were going to Central Park after dinner and Susan was not surprised that Tony was wonderful at necking. He was sure of himself, he did not hurry but took his time, but he was not too slow. She felt like inviting him to the apartment because the park was not much good for real heavy necking, someone might pass or a policeman might interrupt them, but she did not ask him for fear that he would think she was bold and forward.

Then one night when they were petting in the park there was a sudden heavy downpour and Tony said they had better get out of the rain before they got drowned and how about going back to his rooming house just until the rain stopped. Susan felt like suggesting the apartment again, but hesitated once more, since Rita and Consuelo might be home that night, and when Tony took her hesitation as an unwillingness to trust herself indoors with him, she assented fervently and joyously, assuring him that she trusted him and saying she was only sorry that she was wearing her best blouse and skirt which would probably be ruined. They started in where they had left off in the park and Susan took off her blouse which made Tony very excited, but after that he did not go much farther than on any other night, he just stopped at that point and Susan tried to think of what she could possibly do without making Tony think she was a prostitute or a call girl or a pushover, and finally she said that she had better take off her skirt, it was her best most expensive one, it would be ruined, which was enough to make Tony go right ahead before she had the skirt off. She hardly knew what was happening except that it was absolutely marvelous, it was thrilling all over, it was just over too soon, it was not at all painful, not even like having a tooth extracted like that girl at school had said: but it did not last long enough.

Susan lolled in bliss as Tony stood up abruptly and said sternly that she should have told him she was a virgin, it was wrong to start a girl off, only a bastard did that, he just thought all society dames stopped being virgins when they were sweet sixteen at the very latest. "Oh I don't mind, Tony dearest," Susan said, deliciously drowsy, full of pleasure's afterglow.

Susan's reassurance left Tony unrelieved. He said he hated to be a heel, but he was in love with her, she was such a sweet kid, and since he was in love with her, maybe it made a difference. Suddenly he handed her blouse and skirt to her, although she remained stretched out resting, feeling wonderful.

Tony's mention of love made Susan think of marriage, and she sat up straight and told Tony that although she loved him with all her heart she did not want to get married until she was at least twenty-five years of age: she hoped that he was not shocked, but she wanted to be a true woman of the world before settling down to marriage and babies. As she spoke, Tony moved toward the bed, as she continued he sat down upon the bed and squeezed her hand hard. Susan put her arm about his broad shoulders and said that he ought not to feel like a heel, she had been sick of being ch -- -- (she paused, for the word had shocked Tony, although he himself had just said bastard), but no girl with sense waited until marriage in 1950 before making love and going the limit. She stopped. Tony was shocked again.

"Tony, dearest," said Susan, reasoning sweetly, "if I had told you I was ch -- -- a virgin, you would have stopped making love to me because you are an honorable gentleman."

Tony was flattered and surprised to learn that he was a gentleman. He had long known that society dames were dizzy, but not dizzy enough to dismiss the loss of their sweet treasure so lightly, demanding no big build-up, pledges of forever, and the rest of the bushwah before you were in. But she was a sweet kid, and if he had not knocked her up, it was probably all right. No matter what she said, no one but a bastard would break in a girl, but he had not known about it and maybe it made no difference to her just as she said.

Susan moved nearer Tony as his thought passed across his face slowly like Fifth Avenue buses lumbering forward. She wanted to begin again, but she did not want Tony to think that she was insatiable. Suddenly Tony stood up. He said that they better not get excited all over again until they took the proper precautions. Susan, disappointed, was nevertheless pleased. Tony was thoughtful and wanted to protect her. As they left, just to be sure, she asked if she would see him tomorrow night, smiling, and soon delighted when Tony said that she was certainly a sexy kid and she sure was going to see him tomorrow night.

• • •

Susan was soon troubled by the inconvenience and discomfort of making love in a rooming house. She did not like to have to get dressed and go home at midnight when she felt divinely sleepy and also cuddly. When Tony let her stay all night for the first time, it was so much fun to wake up with him as if they were an old married couple. She had to have an apartment of her own and she would tell her parents that she did not like Rita and Consuelo, which was certainly true enough. They were contemptuous of Tony because of his Tenth Avenue accent and Tony detested them, condemning them as snobs. Tony might have stayed with her all night in her room at the apartment, but Susan did not want those two to know how intimate she was with Tony: it was her own private romance which they were utterly incapable of understanding.

Her mother agreed to let her get an apartment without the slightest murmur or comment. Susan found a cute little apartment in Greenwich Village near Washington Square Park. The middle-aged couple who sublet it to her were going to Europe. They were disturbed when she took it practically five minutes after coming through the door and Susan was afraid they might have guessed the reason she wanted an apartment of her own. She was so scared that she left without the key, the husband had to come after her with it, and she acted guilty then, she wondered why. She was not doing anything which she herself regarded as wrong, so it was hard to understand being ashamed and feeling guilty: how stupid!

She went home for the weekend and on Sunday morning Mother called the couple who were subletting the apartment. While Father was reading the Sunday New York Times with a sour look upon his face and Susan was assembling her records, Mother spoke to them at the phone in the foyer and her voice was very clear. Susan saw that Daddums was listening too although he did not lift his head from the paper.

"I am very glad that my daughter has taken your apartment," said Nancy Calhoun. "I am sure that my daughter will take good care of your belongings and books, Professor Dirk. But I am a little concerned about the neighborhood. Susan is only seventeen: will she be quite safe?"

Sometimes Mother made the dumbest most humiliating remarks to total stangers. She was very worldly but sometimes you would never know it. Whatever the man said in answer, Mother just kept it up: he was a professor of philosophy, whatever that was, but the Lord knows what he must have thought.

"Oh, I like Greenwich Village very much," Mother said to him. "I would like to live there myself. I feel that it is high time for the cellophane wrappings to be taken off my daughter. But I want to be sure they are removed gently."

Honestly how dumb could a worldly and clever woman get? Father had heard every word, and if she knew Father, he must be making some sour sarcastic remark to himself about Mother making her child seem like a pack of Chesterfields. Father was not supposed to know everything about his daughter's private life and Susan had gone to all lengths the night before to make him feel that she adored going to art school: she told him that she knew a student who had been in the army and was probably as gifted a painter as Van Gogh.

• • •

Susan took lots more of her things to New York City and with the help of the family chauffeur she moved to the apartment which would be her very own. She was in so much of a hurry, she was so impatient to get moved that she helped the chauffeur to carry in things, hurting his feelings. Hatboxes and shoetrees fell from her hands as she mounted the stoop, and when it was all in the apartment, Susan looked about the living room and saw that it was an awful mess: shoes, laundry, a bath mat and Harper's Bazaar scattered upon the living room floor and upon the studio couch against the wall. She felt bushed: she was eager to see Tony, but so exhausted by her haste that she hardly felt strong enough to rejoice with him in her own apartment.

"I'm just plain bushed," she said to Tony when she called him.

"Take a hot shower," said Tony. "Relaxes you: there's nothing like it. I'll be right down."

When he appeared, Susan, obedient, had taken a hot and cold shower and was wholly refreshed, dressed in her dressing gown, and had fashioned a turban about her head.

"You look like a harem dame!" said Tony, greeting her, kissing her nose and glancing about.

"A nice dump!" he declared, "Good enough" and went in to inspect the bedroom. He sprawled upon the large low double bed, testing the mattress by bouncing up and down upon it.

He closed his eyes in the mimicry of slumber and snoring which signified profound pleasure. Opening his eyes as Susan, charmed, gaped at him, standing between the folding doors, he thrust his arms toward her. She leaped toward the bed and fell into his embrace playfully, gladly, awkwardly, and eagerly.

As she turned aside upon the bed to take off her robe, that the consecration of the house might be consummated fully, Tony sat up, tense.

"Hey. who's that guy?" he said.

"Oh, that's Daddy," said Susan. She had set her father's photograph upon the small bureau which faced the bed.

"He looks like a nice guy," said Tony as he arose and examined Susan's father. Roger Calhoun's studio photograph was one in which self-consciousness showed itself as a solemn gloom of expression.

"He is very sweet," said Susan, drawing her white slip over her head and kicking off her shoes.

"Wait a minute," said Tony. "You know I'm not old-fashioned, but it makes me feel a little peculiar to have your old man staring straight at me when I'm making love to his daughter."

"Oh you silly!" said Susan, unclipping her bra, too absorbed in the movement of the immediate present toward the immediacies of the immediate future to heed Tony's troubled tone. "All that Daddums wants is for me to be happy."

"Sure, that's what they all say." said Tony. "What you can't stop you might as well back."

"Tony, dearest, are you scared that my father will come looking for you with a shotgun?"

"Nah," said Tony, continuing to stare at the photograph and ignoring Susan who was now entirely stripped. "It just gives me a funny feeling."

"But Tony, dearest," said Susan. "when the light is out, you can't see him: you're superstitious!

"You faced death like a brave hero when you were in the army, Mr. Anthony Boyd." she added in the tone of recitation, as Tony turned the photograph face down, "but my sweet harmless father's picture gets you in a tizzy."

"Yup," said Tony, "I'm peculiar that way. Everyone is peculiar in some way, and no one is perfect, certainly not me. so let's just skip the discussion and keep the picture down: maybe I'll get used to it after a while."

"As you wish, my lord and master," said Susan, gracious and playful.

"You're a real honey," said Tony, jumping back into bed, turning out the light, reaching for Susan.

"Now," said Susan sometime later moving to one side, "now let us talk."

She told Tony how a girl she knew said to her boy friend, who wanted to go to sleep after making love, that one must hold a conversation. She tried but was unable to express the sentiment in its first vernacular and unexpurgated form.

"Sure, let's talk," said Tony, feeling heavy and sleepy. "What should we talk about?"

"You decide," said Susan.

"Did I ever tell you that you are a pretty cute trick?" said Tony coyly, teasing her.

"Is that all I am, just a cute trick?" said Susan sadly. Her feelings had been quickly hurt.

"You're the most beautiful girl in the whole world," said Tony, immediately. "You're the most beautiful girl who ever lived anywhere!"

"Oh Tony," said Susan, kissing him for the nobility of his just hyperbole, "Oh Tony, you're so sweet. I would like to eat you, but if I ate you I would not have you tomorrow."

"You can't eat your cake and have it too!" said Tony in a judicious tone. thinking of himself as a chocolate cake.

"Oh Tony," said Susan, "what would you do if I suddenly died tonight?" The idea of eating Tony had suggested the morbid thought of his death and then of her own death to her.

Tony sat upright in bed, startled by the serious turn the conversation had taken unexpectedly.

"I would beat it the hell straight out of here in no time at all." Tony answered.

"Oh Tony, how can you be so cruel and unfeeling?" said Susan. "How can you?" She would have burst into tears right then if she had not felt so wonderful.

"What a girl!" said Tony, as if he were speaking of Susan to a third person, "She asks me an absolutely hypothetical question and I give her an absolutely hypothetical answer and then she gets sore! What do you expect me to do, stick around until the cops grab me for questioning and decide that I poisoned you or something, and have to go to the chair, and fry like an egg?"

"No, Tony dearest," said Susan, hardly mollified by his answer, but willing to discuss the question in the lucid light of reason. "I would not want you to kill yourself, merely because I was dead, nor would I expect you to live as a bachelor all alone for the remainder of your days. But if I died, I think that it would be right for you to go to my parents and tell them that you once loved me very much and hoped to marry me after you became a famous painter and had a lot of money."

Under ordinary circumstances, the allusion to marriage might have made Tony careful, but he was now wholly possessed by images of pursuit in which he made breathless escapes from the police over apartment house roofs: he hardly heard Susan's allusion to marriage.

"That's a good idea," said Tony, remaining bemused. "That's what I will do if you die: I will go to the funeral, hold your mother's hand, and tell your mother and father how much I loved you."

"Would you really?" asked Susan. "Would you really. Tony, dearest one?"

"Sure I would," said Tony, "now that I know that that's what you want me to do."

"If you died," said Susan, reasoned and restored, but still fascinated by the drama of death. "I would kill myself!" she said, violently sitting up. She had not anticipated the conclusion of her sentence when she began it. "My God, woman," said Tony. "don't do that. I don't care what you do after I am dead! What difference does it make to me when I am nothing but a cold corpse."

"I will kill myself!" she insisted with passion. "I don't want to live without you and I don't want to be a sad-looking widow in black. Not only that, Mr. Anthony Boyd, I should think that it would make some slight difference to you to know that I am not going to live after you're dead and in the grave six feet under -- "

Susan paused. Tony had fallen asleep while she spoke. He was snoring in his strong and manly way. Susan kissed his forehead gently and fell asleep curled up near him like a kitten.

• • •

Roger Calhoun's first visit to his daughter's first apartment quickly resulted in a new experience of astonishment. It was truly new, for he had grown accustomed to paternal shocks and surprises, like the inhabitants who live in the shadow of an active volcano. He had winced for weeks after hearing his wife speak of his daughter's cellophane wrappings. But the past now possessed a primitive and illusory character. Susan had come home for the week-end with a sore throat and Nancy had persuaded her to remain until she was well, sending him for Susan's sketchbooks, telling him that the child might be afraid she would fall behind in her art classes.

Having unlocked the double lock which his wife had installed to guard Susan against rape, the patient father followed the urge of natural curiosity and walked through the entire apartment, going from the large living room through the small kitchen to the bedroom in back. At the threshold of the bedroom, he stopped short: his own photograph, solemn and posed, stood on the dresser, facing the long low double bed. A new emotion succeeded curiosity. Surely Nancy was wrong about Susan's desire for an apartment. It was one thing for a young lady of seventeen to have an affair. But was it possible for a simple and natural child like Susan to engage in an affair in this very double bed with her father's image staring directly down at her? If Susan were a special and complicated creature, perhaps. But she was an old-fashioned girl, simple and natural, conventional and respectable, and a little self-conscious too.

Upon the desk where Susan's sketchbooks were. Roger Calhoun saw a book entitled Successful Love. It appeared to be a serious handbook on love and marriage, written by a father and a son and dedicated to the wife of the father and mother of the son. He hesitated a little about borrowing it; but it was not a secret book, it was public domain.

The journey from Pennsylvania Station to the Long Island suburb where he lived took an hour and twenty minutes, and during this time Roger Calhoun rode in a tunnel of absorption, removed from all images, incidents, and passages of the trip, reading of Successful Love.

The authors undertook to advise both the unmarried and married on the requirements, which, fulfilled, would make marriage successful. Susan had marked (continued on page 48) Successful Love (continued from page 38) certain passages N.B. and her father was pleased that she had been taught the sign note well, at Miss Fletcher's school. She had also circled other passages. Many circles occurred in the chapter which dealt with judging the other sex with exactitude: the authors warned against judging anyone when dressed in his Sunday best, at a party or at a dance. Such occasions were at best misleading, often wholly deceptive: appearance was not a reality. It was best to judge those to whom one was attracted not in the evening, but in the morning, after the dance or in the classroom, when they were not dressed up nor intent upon making a pleasing impression. Susan had encircled in the morning, making her father wonder if she had seen the inescapable implication of the discussion, that perhaps the best time to judge another human being was in the morning, before breakfast, which in turn suggested a night in bed with the person in question?

It was quite logical that the next chapter should be devoted to petting and necking: the choice of a partner raised the question of the propriety of petting. To this intimate and difficult theme the authors addressed a tact, subtlety and delicacy which seemed to Roger Calhoun unexampled. Petting and necking were inseparable from the mastery of auto-eroticism, solo or manual. Petting might lead to auto-eroticism in excess, but privation might also lead to an imprudent excess. Nothing whatever was wrong with auto-eroticism in itself; it was not injurious in a physical sense nor depraved from a moral standpoint: the authors were so determined to make this clear that they stated their view in italics and numbered sentences, like rules or commandments. They continued by declaring that if there were no physical or moral reasons to refrain from auto-eroticism, there were grave psychological risks in such practices. The amorous habits and patterns by means of which auto-eroticism was performed might hinder or prevent the supreme joys of marital love.

The train paused at a station: cars at a crossing waited before white gates. The word, auto-eroticism, had been used at least fifteen times and Roger Calhoun thought it might be linked in the authors' minds with the word, automobile, the vehicle which clearly was the theater of much petting and necking. Returning to the book, Roger Calhoun saw that the dangers of petting and necking had been summarized in an italicized sentence: "In petting there is no Mason-Dixon line."

This sentence struck the father as a stupendous piece of wit. Overwhelmed by it, it set off vivid echoes and versions in his mind, and as the train trip-hammered eastward into the falling evening, he reflected with pleasure that in petting there is a Bull Run, in petting there is a Gettysburg, an encounter which is ruinous and indecisive, and may very well lead to a Gettysburg address. There is a Marne, a Verdun, a Château-Thierry; there is just as surely an Austerlitz and a Verdun. If many a Caesar of love must have said that he had just crossed the Rubicon, many an Empress must have mourned a Pyrrhic victory, or perceived that in petting an empire had been overthrown, a Rome had begun to fall. There must be a phase comparable to the fall of France, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, and Hiroshima, as there must be an Alsace Lorraine, a D-Day, a V-E Day, a V-J Day.

Neither war nor love were joking matters, as Roger Calhoun soon saw in the chapter devoted to the causes of marital conflict, failure, and divorce. One of the chief causes of these disasters or catastrophes was the tendency to expect perfection in other human beings, although no human being was perfect, neither the authors nor the readers. The expectation was natural, but since one person cannot be everything, it was also vicious and destructive, because the most gifted human being, the greatest genius, suffered from extraordinary defects and limitations. Thus Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the truly great musicians, was the prey of an ungovernable temper which broke out daily or weekly in street brawls and scenes of physical violence in the sanctity of a church. Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees had been the greatest slugger of all times: he had hit more home runs than any other baseball player; but he had also struck out more times than any other athlete, and what is more, he had struck out far more often than he had hit a homer.

Roger Calhoun, pausing, glanced at his wrist watch: how much farther in the brave new world of 1950 would he go before getting to the sanctuary and ancient castle of his own home? Fifteen minutes of sheetlightning revelation remained: he had not felt as he now felt since he had last taken gas, in 1927, when an impacted wisdom tooth had been extracted from his jaw.

Successful Love next analyzed the chief cause of marital conflict, failure and divorce: it was not alcoholism, cruelty, pathological inclinations, infidelity, nor any of the other reasons frequently cited in court. The true cause was at once simple and complicated: it was lack of respect for the other person, husband or wife. Success was desirable, money might help, kindness assuage, children console: but there was no real substitute for true respect. Yet if too little respect was catastrophic, the presence of too much respect might also be disastrous. Too much respect showed itself chiefly as squeamishness in making love. Once the marriage had been consummated, all squeamishness deserved the utmost condemnation: modesty of any kind was a mockery of the beauty of marriage, the meaning of unity, the oneness of husband and wife.

As the suburban train shuffled and slowed to the station, Roger Calhoun took a last glance at the book on love, and his gaze was caught by a sentence which Susan had circled four times: "Although it is not ordinarily thought of as such, the mind is the first of the erogenous zones."

Rising from his seat, dazed, he dismounted slowly from the train, waving vaguely to his wife who awaited him in the old coupe.

"How are you, dear?" said Nancy Calhoun, kissing her husband lightly. "You look a little haggard."

He motioned incoherently to the book in his hand.

"Susan's book," he said, bending to the car door and taking the wheel. "Successful Love by a father and son."

His wife took the book from him and placed it in her lap.

"You look as if it had left you stunned," said Nancy Calhoun, gentle and curious.

"Did you know," said Roger Calhoun in a hoarse voice, shifting gears, "that although it is not ordinarily thought of as such, the mind is the first of the erogenous zones?"

"Dear Roger," said his wife, "I see nothing wrong with that remark. Did you think the book was not a good book for Susan?"

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do," said Roger Calhoun, disregarding his wife's question, preoccupied with his own emotion, "but don't stay too long, or else you will no longer feel at home at home."

• • •

Out of the unpredictable and literal blue, in the mist of veritable, mild, and serene summer of their happiness and joy, Tony was recalled by the army. He and Susan had been so preoccupied with each other that they hardly knew there was a war in Korea. Tony was recalled partly because of his age, and his draft board's problems, partly as a result of the special training he had acquired and partly by accident. Although Susan was grief-stricken and Tony was annoyed at first, Tony soon told his dearest sweet-heart that one must be a man about these matters, one must place one's duty to one's country first, one must not feel oneself exempt from a man's duty to his country as a loyal American citizen just because one was a painter. His avowals were not smug and platitudinous because they were enunciated in a Tenth Avenue accent.

"You are a hero," said Susan, bursting into tears of sorrow and pride.

When the time to say farewell neared, Susan armed herself with all the vows and sentiments customary on such occasions. Tony found her heartfelt avowals a little trying, resembling a funeral he had once attended. All that she said took it for granted that he was practically dying or dead or was probably going to get killed or at least crippled for life. It was ridiculous except that girls were like that and cried about spilt milk before it was spilled. Not for a split second did Tony suppose that he would be killed in Korea: his whole being suffused him with a sense of his own actuality and hence immortality.

On the night before Tony's departure, (continued overleaf) the great question of fidelity arose. Susan swore that she would be faithful to her dearest heart and she expected him to be faithful to her, however intense the temptation.

Susan had thought a lot about fidelity. She wanted to tell Tony her thoughts. She did not think that it would be difficult for them to be faithful to each other since they truly loved each other. She had arrived at this conviction while re-reading Successful Love (returned by her father without her being aware it had been borrowed).

The sentence which had much impressed Roger Calhoun -- "although it is ordinarily not thought of as such, the mind is the first of the erogenous zones" -- had perplexed Susan and Tony as well. Suspecting a pornographic or recondite meaning, they had consulted the dictionary and sought out the meaning of erogenous.

"The mind is very sexy," said Susan when she arrived at an understanding of the sentence.

"It sure is," said Tony, wondering why such thoughts were not stated in plain English.

Now in this tragic hour of farewell and departure, Susan, compelled by her emotions to a hither to unexercised ingenuity of mind, had concluded with a new version of the sentence about how sexy the mind was.

"Since the mind is the first most sexy zone," said Susan sweetly serious, "and in view of the fact that we are very much in love with one another, our minds are so full of thoughts of each other that we cannot possibly be attracted to anyone else in a sexy way."

Fidelity had never preoccupied Tony, Which made it difficult for him to follow Susan. She had to make herself clear in vivid physical detail. When at last he understood, he was very pleased. He grinned at Susan, charmed; grinned so widely that Susan had to ask him what he was grinning about.

"Although I never thought of it as such," said Tony, "the heart is the first of the sexy zones. And you're a pretty cute chick to figure all this out by your self."

"You helped me, dearest," said Susan modestly, very pleased, "and anyway if I were not so much in love with you. I would not have been able to figure it out: love is an inspiration!"

"Well I am just as much in love with you," said Tony, "and I did not figure it out, you did!"

Susan was not interested in the question of credit very much, she was far more interested in thinking about the truth that love assured fidelity. And now the mind had been discussed with so much pleasure that the disregarded body asserted itself. Silently, in a hush inspired by love at once sacred and profane, sharpened and intensified by the drama of departure and separation, they went to the bedroom, disrobed as under a spell, hypnotized or drugged, stretched out upon the bed, reaching and surrendering to each other as if for the duration of eternity, making love with the most intense tenderness, sensual sweetness and jubilant joy.

• • •

Tony's departure immediately made Susan lonesome and blue, and she felt worse all the time. The apartment made her think of Tony all the time, with pain, fear, longing, and desire. Little as she liked Rita and Consuelo, with them she would at least not be alone all the time. She returned to their menage, and visited her own dear little apartment only to look for letters from Tony. She took his first letter into the bedroom of their love and lay down upon the bed, reading it again and again, unashamed of the hot and bitter tears which rolled down her face, thinking of how strong, handsome and brave Tony was.

Susan's letters to Tony were full of declarations of love which concluded with the mind as the guardian of fidelity. Tony's letters disregarded all personal sentiments except for love and kisses at the end. He described army life and his own feats in a boastful unself-conscious way. But at last, when Susan's declarations of eternal love had reached a new summit of dedication, Tony answered in a way which would give the kid something to hang onto after he left the continental United States.

"Beautiful chick," he wrote to her, "if you really mean what you said in your last, then as soon as we get this feud in Korea cleaned up, I'll be back in no time at all, and we'll have to do something about it."

This was the closest he had ever come to a proposal of marriage. He was going by train to San Francisco the next day, and soon after to Japan and Korea. It was not likely that he would come back very soon across the Pacific Ocean.

• • •

Requested by his wife to look at the apartment which his daughter had ceased to occupy, because the dear child might not have tidied up properly, Roger Calhoun made his second visit to what he regarded, at times, as his daughter's love nest. Going north in a taxi from Wall Street, he questioned the dignity of his mission. There was no point, however, in being pompous or disingenuous about it when his curiosity about youth in 1950 continually mounted.

The living room and the kitchen were ridden by the ruins of a party: bottles of ginger ale, Pepsi-Cola, and root beer, boxes of Cheese-its, Fig Newtons, and Ritz crackers, containers of ice cream, jars of jam, and jars of pickels, dirty dishes and crushed paper napkins were all over. The children must have had a veritable bacchanalia, he thought, which had to be compared to the cocktail parties of his own generation, at which some were unable to converse before gulping four Martinis and from which Roger Calhoun withdrew overcome by taedium vitae and a contempt for this world to a gymnasium or a Turkish bath.

He went to the bedroom, conscious that he wanted to find something, unable to think of what it was. He saw it instantly, glancing at the dresser where his studio photograph presided as before, solemn and posed, staring down upon his daughter's bed of sin. The presence of his face sustained a mild modest pleasure, a delightful suspicion of his own misgivings. Perhaps he ought to doubt his doubts about the morality and conduct of youth if he took pleasure in the innocence which permitted his photograph in the intimacy of his daughter's bedroom.

The bedroom was in a state of disorder more extreme than the kitchen and living room. The framed photograph was the only form of order: the disheveled bed resembled the dirty snowdrifts in a city street four days after the worst blizzard of winter. Kicking one of his daughter's dispersed shoes by accident, his own heel trod upon what appeared to be a discarded letter. He picked it up, brushing the dust from it with a coat sleeve. It was Tony's last communication before departing for Korea.

It was not precisely a proposal of marriage, but surely it expressed genuine affection and sympathy, assuming that he was capable of recognizing those sentiments in a generation so distant from him and the life he had lived. He felt grateful to the young man, certain that he had been kind to Susan. Yet, without knowing why, he felt acute relief that there appeared to be no need to meet the young man.

He left, Nancy would have to send the servants to clean the place. She had been right again, as she so often was. It would be difficult to get a taxi unless he walked to Fifth Avenue.

Gazing at the brittle glitter and nervous exhilaration of the great avenue in the sparkling, hurried hour after work and before dinner, he thought of the restoration of coffee, went to the first drugstore, seated himself on a backless stool at the end of the soda fountain counter, and saw his daughter Susan at a distance, seated so that she could not see him. She was with a very spruce-looking young man. It was very awkward. He must go before she saw him. Susan was succeeding in at once munching her sandwich, drinking her malted milk, and talking with much intensity to the young man.

Pausing to pay his check and feeling furtive, his back was turned to his daughter as the cashier changed his ten-dollar bill, and in the interval he heard what his daughter was saying to her new young man.

"In petting," she said sternly and slowly, as one mastering something to be memorized, "there is no Mason-Dixon line. You must not forget that or think that I am holding out on you and being mean."

"Maybe so," said the young man in a tone clipped and intimidated, "but you have to make up your mind sooner or later."

"Although it is not ordinarily thought of as such," said Susan, "the mind is the first of the erogenous zones. If you just give me a chance, I will explain what that means to you -- "

Roger Calhoun left as if he were making an escape from a penitentiary and from a period of history. He did not want to know how long it would be before the spruce young man succeded Susan's true love in the first of the erogenous zones. It might be true that most human beings are much simpler than one commonly supposes them to be; one is oneself far simpler than one often supposes. But it was also true that the simple were extremely complicated. He felt entirely lost in the terror and jungle of innocence.

"The mind is very sexy," said Susan.