Chapter 4
Looking back over those years of childhood I notice two things: how lucky I was never to land in real trouble, and how mild were my emotions, compared with my sensations. For all my illicit sexual dealings with both boys and girls, no parent or teacher ever descended on me in wrath, though surely some of my young partners must have blabbed, at times! But perhaps not: after all, I never forced one of them, against his or her will. They consented, and they kept mum. Not that much was done, after all: no actual fucking, no buggery; only the normal sports and explorations of the young. Perhaps a few parents turned a Nelson eye, remembering their own childhood. Perhaps my very shamelessness protected me, a magic shield.
The only time I was fairly caught was by the mother of the baby girl next door, as I have related. Now I was a manly character of sixteen, and that mother looked at me pensively over the fence, sometimes, and blushed at her thoughts (as if she could read mine). She spoke to me in a friendly way, but I did not dare to go over the fence, though I handed sweets to the little girl. Surreptitiously, when the mother was not about, I watched the little girl piddling in her sand-pit, then dabbling her fingers in the warm wet sand, a favourite game of hers. But I never touched her again, though, frankly, I would have liked to. Or the mother, either.
The mother engaged a new maid to look after the toddler, an Irish girl of sixteen, my own age, pretty as a picture. I made eyes at her, but we had never spoken, when one day I had a great thrill. It was late evening. I went into the bathroom but did not immediately put on the light, as I noticed the light was on in the bathroom next door, and the spring blind was not drawn down. Someone was moving about in there, I saw the rosy-pearl gleam of flesh. Presently she came under the light, and I, playing Peeping Tom, saw her in all her young splendour, that little coleen: stark naked, petite, black-haired, black-eyed, with springy round bubbies, and black hair on her pussy, like the ace of spades. She suddenly paused, looked out of the window suspiciously, as if she had felt the caress of my eyes, then pulled down the blind and I could see only the shadowshow, as she put on her nightie.
The next night I kept trotting upstairs, on one pretext or another, till I saw the light on. Again I could see her, fully clothed, however, and bending about, filling the bath, as I guessed. I too put the light on and ran a bath for myself. She disappeared and reappeared confusingly. I locked the door, and undressed. We had a lace curtain instead of a blind. My window was steaming over. I stood on a chair and wiped the steam away, and drew back the curtain. I could no longer see Molly, who was presumably in the water, reclining, soaping that seductive pussy, sponging those tits. Could she sec me, as I stood naked at the window?
I had my bath, standing up, most of the time, so as not to miss a glimpse at the window. I stepped out and rubbed myself with the towel. Needless to say I soon had a frantic erection, that drove me to wild action. I switched the light on and off three times, like a signal. Nothing happened. I waited a few minutes, then did the same again. Molly approached the window, towelled, and reached up her hand to pull down the spring blind, staring across to where I was. She pulled the blind about a foot, then paused again.
She disappeared once more. Had she gone away, to tell tales? I gave my three flash signal again. This time, her light replied: three flashes.
I hurried to the window, wiped the steam away once more, stood on a chair and waved. I saw her wipe the steam away, too. But she was wrapped in a towel from head to foot. I had nothing on, and turned in profile to exhibit my standing tool more conspicuously, frigging it to show what I meant. I could sec only the upper part of her, but she too climbed on to a chair or box, under the light, where she had stood the night before, and slowly, deliciously, unrobed, uncovering first a shoulder and breast, then the other shoulder, then letting the towel fall completely. She pirouetted round to show me her bottom and give me a profile view as well. Then she jumped down, probably with a sudden access of shame, and down came the blind.
I watched till the light went out, and saw another go on in the skylight of her attic bedroom, but no glimpse of her was visible up there.
by now I was in a fine state. I hurried to Leslie's room. He was drowsy, and did not want to be awoken.
"What do you want?" he mumbled.
"I want to get into bed with you," I said, scrambling in.
"What for? No, I don't want to, I don't feel like it." "I've just seen the maid next door having a bath, it was marvellous," I said. "Feel this."
"You're a liar," he said as usual. "You're always horny, I tell you I don't feel like it. No!" He struggled, and rolled over on his face.
But I was too randy to take no for an answer. I yanked his pyjama legs down to his knees, and forced my knees between his thighs. Lying on his back, I rubbed my prick in the groove of his bum, and even playfully tried to jab it in the hole, but he was too dry and resistant. He tightened the cheeks together, which gave me an exciting sensation in itself. So I pushed it lower down, so that my knob was touching his ballbag. By now he had begun to warm up, in spite of himself, as I could tell. I put my hand down and he let me slide it under and hold his penis. I enjoyed pressing my tummy on the two cheeks of his little bottom, and I came in a quick spasm, half thinking about him and half about the colleen. The thing that it was most exciting to think about was her turning round to exhibit all sides of herself, and then all at once turning coy afterwards.
My young brother was grumbling at my puddling him up-"Why do you make so much?"-and then complaining because I had left off doing anything to him, having satisfied myself. "I haven't shot yet, Bobbin, you are mean!" he said. "I say, can I do it on your bottom ?"
"O all right"-I had no thrill left in me, but did not want to be ungrateful. So we reversed positions, and he, clammy with my come, rode on my bottom, giggling like a schoolgirl. His cock was small, only the size of my forefinger. I felt it nudge my hole, and it was almost in when his spunk gushed. He subsided, with a long "Oooo!" that was partly pleasure and partly guilt. He was always reluctant to start, and always felt guilty afterwards, unlike me. I squeezed his shoulders reassuringly, before I left to go back to my own bed, and told him patronisingly, "You're a good kid."
But my larks with my younger brother were coming to an end: we lost interest, and even as a substitute I didn't really want him any more; while Sandy, the elder, had left home.
As for my Irish girl, we went on signalling and exhibiting to each other a couple of times a week before we even had a conversation. Then one evening I waylaid her in the back alley, and we cuddled in "the shadows. I told her how pretty she was, which was no flattery. She let me feel her tits, but put up a struggle when I tried to get my hand in lower down.
"Not now-you mustn't-not now!" she said. I did not catch her meaning, till finally I shoved my hand into her knickers, encountered a thick gauzy wad, and came up with a bloody finger. I think she expected me to be disgusted at contact with her menstrual blood, or the smell of burnt toast which it gave out; but I laughed. From the first contact onwards, I have never felt fastidious about a woman's periods. "The flowers," we used to call it when I was young. I liked my little Molly in flower. But she couldn't understand that. She had her share of shame, after all.
We met again when she was all clear, and she let me play with that pussy I had seen from afar. She resisted when I directed her hand to my fly, but at length held me with scared fingers, and learned how to stroke and manipulate my "thing," as she called it, till I came. But she would not let me put it near her cunt. Anyway, we could hardly have fucked in the alley so near home, and we had no other place or opportunity. We were caught once, kissing and cuddling there by my parents, who rebuked me sternly later; they seemed mainly worried about class distinction!
I enjoyed shocking her, which was easy to do. She blushed to the eyebrows when I told her what I did with my brother, after first seeing her exhibit herself at the window. "Goodness, you didn't! Goodness!" she exclaimed. "How do you mean?"
So I described it in exact detail, and she kept saying, "Shut up, I don't want to hear any more!" but obviously wanting to, all the same. When I fingered her, she was very wet. She was in the mood, and told me something to excite me, too. "I like to think about you when I go to the lav.," she said. "I squeeze my legs tight together and it feels lovely." We were both highly excited, and I think that in spite of the difficulties, standing up in the dark corner, we should have at least attempted to couple, that night; but a lamp shone upon us, and a cyclist rode by, turning his head for an eyeful. He must have seen her holding my cock, if nothing more. Molly was very flustered, straightened her clothes at once, and exclaimed, "I hate this place!"
Once again, nothing really happened, and pretty Molly went to another job, and I more or less forget her. It was just one more of the frustrated sex contacts that go on everywhere, all the time. Under the business of life there is a great network of them, winks, touchings, pinchings, rubbings, sly orgasms in crowded buses and trains, glimpses of the "private parts" of strangers through keyholes, windows, holes in lavatory walls, kissings and suckings and finger-fucks in back alleys, mutual masturbations with brothers and sisters, private pleasures in front of mirrors or through holes in sanitary towels, lascivious memories and wet dreams. A huge network of unadmitted pleasures, making up by far the biggest part of the sex-life of poor, hungry mankind.
After passing my exams, that year, I went for a holiday in the country, and there I again met Ruby, the girl I had assaulted among the blackberry bushes. She was now twenty, and in full bloom. Hers was a simple country prettiness, her figure was too short and solid to be good, her face round and rosy, goodnatured and gay. The lads of the village found her very attractive, and she was flirting with several at once.
She looked at me with new eyes, and remarked on how much I had grown. I sized her up appreciatively: her bottom was round and mobile, and her big breasts seemed almost out of control, they swung and bounced about so much. But I never imagined I had any chance with her.
One moonlight night, however, she had to cycle from one village to the next, and I was going the same way, so we rode off together. We had a bantering conversation about her boy friends, as we rode, and I found pleasure in watching the motions of her strong legs. Ideas began to form in my head, and I thought of a stratagem.
"I'll have to get off, Ruby," I said, ceasing to turn the pedals. "What for?"
"I have to pee." I dismounted. "O all right then." She followed suit. "Come with me," I said. "Not likely!"
I went among the bushes. I could hardly produce a drop. I got a semi-erection, instead. I heard Ruby rustle the bushes, and knew she had decided to relieve herself in a secluded spot, at the same time. The patter of her piddle on the leaves, noisy in the warm, still night, led me to the place. I surprised her, squatting on her heels.
Of course she told me to go away, and of course I refused. I liked catching her in this vulnerable, intimate situation^ and the very sound of her stream gave me a thrill. She had not quite finished, and I put one arm round her shoulders, the other between her legs. It gushed hotly through m^ fingers, then trickled away and died off. She said nothing more at all. She stood up, my hand still there, and stepping a pace away from the wet leaves we began kissing, fondling, squeezing, with rapture, as though we had come out for nothing else. There was nothing coy about Ruby, now. She gave herself the privileges of her seniority: she knew that for all my bold advances, I was totally inexperienced and needed a teacher.
She put her hand down and seized my prick-I had not even buttoned myself up again after my piddle. She shook and jerked it rather too fiercely for my taste. I pulled her down on to the grass.
**I want to have you," I whispered, in a strangled voice.
Ruby pulled her own pants off, pulled me down between her legs, and undid my trousers from top to bottom, then slid her hands in to embrace my buttocks. I found a way into her bodice, and touched her great soft breast. I squirmed my tongue into her cheek. I felt the wet lips of her cunt, and tried to find the clitoris in the folds. I made my left arm a pillow for her head and fumbled inefficiently with the right hand.
Ruby was panting with excitement. She wanted it desperately. She had had a number of strapping country lovers, but now she was having a virginal lad of sixteen, giving him the first full experience of his life, and she knew it. The notion raised her to boiling point. Besides, she had a two years' old memory of sexual interest in me to add to the stimulus. So had I!
Ruby's firm hand took my prick and guided it into position. I felt the warm, slippery walls hold it deliciously. Bursting with excitement, I pushed in, pulled out, pushed again and felt all the golden warmth in me pour down my body and gush up through my prick in one flood. I had come-on the second stroke. Poor Ruby!
I panted, and almost wept on her breast.
"I couldn't help it," I sobbed. Tears of fury filled my eyes. I tore handfuls of grass out by the roots.
"It's the first time, isn't it, Bobbin?"
"Yes," I confessed brokenly.
"Well, never mind"-she smiled and stroked my head.
I put my hand between her legs. She put her hand on top of it, squeezed her legs together, and her muscles went rigid for a moment or two, then relaxed. That small pleasure had to content her.
Before we put ourselves to rights and rode away again, Ruby squatted and squeezed and wiped out what I had left in her. That was all the contracepting she did. Happy-go-lucky, the country girls.
I had achieved the act that symbolises manhood, that was about all that could be said for my first fuck. My sensations had been intense, but maddeningly short-lived. Would Ruby ever give me another chance?
Yes, I did have the amiable Ruby again, several times, and with proper enjoyment, though not for a year or more. In fact, I had her almost at yearly intervals during my adolescence, as circumstances would have it. And meanwhile, Ruby and Molly and all were swept right out of my head by my first real love affair.
I was just seventeen, the classic age for calf-love, I suppose. It was in the gap between my being a schoolboy and becoming a student. My first holiday on my own, a sunny seaside resort, and a girl only a little older than myself. Jean was eighteen. She had come all the way from Scotland to join an English girl she knew, but her friend had been taken ill, and Jean was alone among the Sassenachs. We were staying at the same boarding-house, and were the only people without partners. It was natural that we should become tennis and dance partners for the fortnight we were there, and should be treated in an indulgent, romantic way by our elders. Natural that we should look at each other with an eye to physical charms, and be inclined to surrender to the atmosphere of tinsel sentiment-the sweet dance music in the glass on the seafront, the fairy lights along the promenade, the whispered suggestions of the waves. But to me something more surprising happened, something that all these things could not account for.
I remarked earlier in this chapter how strong were my sensations in childhood and how mild my emotions. I had a distant affection for my parents, mixed feelings for my brothers, a tender regard for the Major, spasms of romantic warmth for Judy, and Lizzy, and Jim, and the boy they called "Lily." But with Jean it was passionate love, and at first sight.
She was a "nutbrown maiden" from the Highlands, and not particularly pretty, having the prominent cheekbones and jawbone characteristic of her race, but a frank and friendly look went with them, and her figure was trim: she walked beautifully. Her voice was richly Scottish, and soft in the country way. She laughed a great deal, and talked to me not of film stars but of Byron, whom she idolised, and of her country's history, about which she had passionate feelings. This amazed me, as I had little or no interest in the history of my own country, let alone any emotions about it. But I was caught up in her enthusiasms, and everything she said or did seemed wonderful. I lay awake at night thinking about her, I was desolate if I missed seeing her at breakfast or tea, I found I wanted to be with her all of every day, and nothing seemed any good any more if she was not there to share it. I wanted to serve her, suffer for her, sacrifice myself for her; I wished she were drowning so that I could rescue her. But, unfortunately she could swim better than I.
I was so dazed with this whirlwind in my heart, that for three days I made no sexual overture to her, though in retrospect that seems incredible! On the third day we went swimming in a salt-water pool by the shore, instead of in the sea; there was a band playing waltzes, and we tried to waltz together in the water. She did not mind my clinch, and her pear-shaped breasts in the wet costume were compressed against my chest in a pleasantly erode way. "I wish we could swim without costumes," I said. She answered unhesitatingly, "Yes* so do I," and added that she had done so, in Loch Ness.
"Alone?" I inquired, "or with the Monster?" I felt a jealous pang.
No, with her girl friend, Kate. She told me how pretty her friend was, such long legs, and such lovely round breasts. The frankness of this description filled me with joy. That night, dancing in the glass hall, I said, "I bet your friend's breasts are not as nice as yours."
She only laughed, but we both know the significance of my remark. I suddenly said I was tired of dancing, and how about a walk?
Jean agreed, we left the hall, and walked under the stars, heading inland, up the hill towards the castle. Soon we left the road, and were entirely alone, on the grassy swards among the clumps of trees, with the old walls high above us and the white line of the waves far below. It was chilly. I was afraid Jean would say that it was too cold to sit down and that we must keep walking. I wanted to make an attempt to fuck her, but had no idea whether she would play or not, or whether she was a virgin. (I hoped not.) Instead, I found myself telling her I was in love with her, and just about offering her the sun, moon and stars. Did she love me, too?
"Yes," she breathed; O yes, she did love me, from the minute she saw me. I believed her, absolutely. I did not know whether to rush on to the question of engagement and marriage, but decided to leave all that till nearer the end of our holiday, in case she might be scared by such a precipitate move. We had a bout of kissing instead. Then we sat down on my mackintosh, and while she recited Byron my hand stole into the leg of her knickers. When I reached her clitoris and began to make that famous nerve jump, she turned off Childe Harold and fell back in my arms. My other hand reached her breast. The pear-shaped are not my favourite -I might have preferred the round ones of her friend Kate-but they were soft and young. And they were hers, my own love's, my Jean's, and I was touching them, and she wanted me to touch them. That meant everything.
I pulled her knickers down, felt her muscular hips, held the cheeks of her bottom in my palms. I moved one hand away from that delightful region, to undo my buttons and get my rod out. She took hold of it, and murmured: "O Bobbin!" in a sigh of adoration. She guided it expertly into her cunt, with an anxious admonition: "You will pull it out in time, won't you? I dinna want a bairn just yet."
"All right," I said, a bit disappointed over this handicap, and cursing myself for not having thought of buying a French letter.
But I was fairly launched on the second fuck of my life, and determined not to spoil it by coming too soon, as I had with Ruby.
I already knew I was not Jean's first lover, young though she was. Without saying a single word she taught me, by her own muscular movements, how to move rhythmically and not too fast, to go deep into her and draw slowly out almost to the tip, a steady thrilling piston-stroke. And then gradually speeding up, my head swimming with images of clouds and swirling waves, till a sudden automatism took over, so that I was no longer in control. It was as if the great god Pan was riding on my back, making my rhythm for me. As I kissed her my mouth watered and I let the saliva spill into her mouth, and heard her gulp it, and felt her excitement increase. I was driving faster, faster, my mind almost blacked out in helpless dizziness, I could feel the surge coming up through me, coming, coming, and I knew she was coming, too. But like an alarm clock breaking into one's sleep, her warning words returned and on the final stroke I pulled right out, thrust forward on to her belly, and filled her navel with my hot milk, which overflowed both sides and ran down her hips. She had come at the same instant, and we went limp together, wrapped in each other's arms and as happy as two creatures can be.
We lay there an age under the stars, without speaking. She quietly wiped up the mess, presently, with her handkerchief. The air was colder, but my braw Scottie did not seem to feel it. By and by she began playing with my limp cock, with loving and exploring fingers, and touched the sensitive under-skin of my balls. I was surprised to find myself rising again. I reciprocated by feeling around inside her cunt, finding the pee-hole, and reaching right in till I could touch the mouth of the womb. She particularly liked it when I ran my finger back and forth on that gothic arch inside the inner Hps. Now I was wanting her again, feverishly, and soon sank myself into her depths.
Jean was a girl who really cooperated, really used her cunt, made a rhythm to match mine, gripped and rolled my prick so purposefully that you would have thought she had a small pair of hands in there. Once again we came together. Every single time I fucked her she managed the timing so that we came on the dot together, and that is a wonderful thing.
The next day I made so bold as to buy some French letters. I became a pretty regular customer at that shop, where the fat old chemist smiled at me knowingly. I shagged Jean every day and sometimes twice and three times a day, on hills and in dells, on beaches and park benches (very difficult, that) arid once or twice in her bedroom by stealing about in bare feet at dead of night-we were both scared of a scandal at the boarding-house. But everybody must have guessed what was going on between us: we looked so gaga, and so radiant, and so exhausted at times, and we could , help making intimate gestures or remarks. Jean not only loved me, she loved the act of love. She had a great appetite for the flesh itself.
I asked her who had been her lover before me. A young man, she said. Nice, but not the marrying sort, and he had gone abroad. Was he the first? No, there was one other. Who? She didn't want to talk about it. But I persisted, and after a few days' nagging, she told me. He was her schoolteacher, a man of about fifty, and he took her virginity on a desk, in detention one evening. She was the only girl in the building, the last to leave, and he was supposed to be locking up, when he suddenly put his arms round her and kissed her. Then he lost control, and possessed her.
"I was fourteen," she said. "He mopped up the blood with blotting-paper." "Did it hurt?"
"Och, yes, like anything, I got no fun." "Did you hate it? Did you tell anyone?" "Goodness, no! He was awfu' nice and gentle." "Did he have you again?"
"Ay, a few times, till I left school." She added: "He had a few ither girls, too. I used to advise him, which he could try and which were-telltales and prudes. He used to ask me, do you think yon Mary would let me? v and I'd say, O ay, she told me she'd let the postman grope her, an' all. But steer clear of Janie Campbell."
"And did he get caught?"
"Not a bit of it. He retired last year and the collection for him was the biggest the school ever raised,"
"Why wouldn't you tell me about him, are you ashamed of it?" I asked her.
"Not really, but I'm always afraid to talk about it, I wouldn't like it to get back and mak' trouble for him," she said. "He was awfu' gentle."
One day Jean and I decided to bathe in the nude. We walled till we found a desolate, weedy shore, with low cliffs behind. No sign of tents or ice-cream carts here. We stripped and left our clothes by the cliff, then ran and danced on the beach, and flung ourselves into the waves. The afternoon was sunny, we were having a May heat-wave, and the sea, though foaming in, was not cold. It was heavenly to feel the play of air and water on our flesh from head to foot, the splash of the spray on our genitals, the absolute direct contact of the elements, with no veil of convention to spoil it. Heavenly, to me, to see my Jean with nothing to break the smooth continuity of her lovely young body from shoulder to toe; to see her breasts dancing in the wave crests, and the water slip over her bottom as she dived, like the backs of seals; and to feel the wet weed of hair between her legs, when we lay embracing in the shallow ripples at the edge.
We ran about on the sand till we were dry, and then inevitably, automatically, ray down and began making love. She played with my cock, which needed no coaxing, however. I rolled on top of her, and was just getting in, when my eye caught a flutter of colour on the cliff-top. 'Among the tussocks up there were two people, a man and perhaps a girl or perhaps another man, a youth, lying face down, side by side, watching us.
I told Jean. "Tell them to go away," she said.
I stood up, totally nude-our clothes were ten yards away-my prick up in front like a clothes-prop, and shouted, "Please go away!"
The peepers did not answer. One of them trained apair of field-glasses on us.
I repeated my appeal. They took no notice. I distinctly heard laughter.
"They won't go," I said to Jean. "I don't care, let them look. Let the wide world look, if it likes to see two people happy. Do you mind much?"
"Are they men or women?" Jean asked.
"Both men, I think."
"O weel, let them watch, if they'll enjoy it," she said.
So I knelt down again between her thighs, and she held my prick, which had drooped a little, and frisked it back to vigour. The salt sea had sealed her up a little, too, and I had to play a while with the lips till she lubricated freely. Then again I went in and took her, with all the ease of familiarity and all the fervour of youthful passion.
It was a curious sensation to know that those two up on the cliff were watching every motion, with lecherous curiosity. I think we were not an unlovely sight, our two sunlit young bodies blending into one and beating in rhythm like the heartbeat of the cockeyed world.
Except perhaps at the very climax, I could not forget those four eyes, but it did not inhibit me. Jean and I confessed to each other, afterwards, that we even got a slightly perverse thrill out of the idea, once we had accepted it. And they certainly had all they could wish.
We lay awhile sunbathing afterwards, arms entwined, flat on our backs, prick, cunt and tits carelessly displayed to the viewers, lazy and content. When we got up and walked towards our clothes, the couple on the cliff got up too, and began walking back to the town. We never saw them clearly enough to identify them, but I inclined to the opinion that the smaller one was a girl, while Jean preferred to think they were both males. Who were they? Husband and wife, father and son, homosexual lovers, just two randy young men looking for thrills? Did they masturbate themselves or each other as they watched us, did they couple when we rested, had they come when we came together? All we knew was that they walked away with their arms round each other's waist.
We must have passed them again in the days that followed, on the sea-front or the beach or in the shopping-streets. We used to say to each other, "Do you think it was that couple?"-and laugh. We had the tantalising knowledge that they must have recognised us, whereas we could not spot them. It gave us a certain self-conscious swagger, being on parade before those unknown eyes.
The holiday drew to and end, and I asked Jean again whether she loved me. "O ay," she said. "But holidayfashion, ye know, Bobbin, not for life."
This stung me. I would love her for life, I vowed.
On the last day we went for a last walk up the hill where I had first had her. We sat down and talked sadly of parting.
"Look here, here's guid news for ye," she said, pulling her knicker-leg aside and showing me a sanitary towel in place. "I'm not in the family way."
But I was crestfallen. "I wanted to have you, for the last time."
"Never mind."
She bent down and began to suck my prick, by way of compensation. Nobody had ever done it to me before, and I found it a delicious sensation. But too passive; soon I was wanting to fling myself forward, to urge my thickness into her hole, any hole, her arse, her mouth even, but to be the driving force, not simply to have my juice sucked out of me.
"Take this thing off, let's have it all the same!" I lid.
No, she couldn't, she never had, she wouldn't like it, I might hurt her. But she too wanted a last fling, and wanted very much to please me. I unpinned the wad, and plunged into the blood. She cried out at the first thrust: the flesh felt peculiarly tender, she said. But her sensations were sharp and she was never more estatic than that last time, almost foaming at the mouth. As for me, the idea that she was having a new experience keyed me up, too, and I felt extra love and gratitude to her for risking it for my sake. I used no French letter that time, and did not attempt to pull out, certain that this one time it was safe. We came as if we would never stop coming, and I pulled out my totem-pole all lathered in spunk and blood, like a symbol of pagan sacrifice.
Jean and I cried when we parted. But how right she was! We wrote to each other for six months, and exchanged greeting cards for Christmas and birthdays for two or three years. But our next meeting was postponed and postponed, and the idea began to seem ridiculous, and I wondered how I could ever have thought about proposing marriage to that girl, whom I knew so slightly. I came to realise that it would be a fiasco if we ever did meet again-we should both have changed to much, our calf-love was over, and our fresh copulations could never measure up to our magical memories.
But now I wonder! I rather wish we had met again, and risked our disillusion, and trusted our instincts. We might have made something of it, even at a second throw. It isn't every day that one meets a woman who can put herself so completely, so simply and beautifully into the act of love. But in those days, I did not yet know how rare a gift it might be.