Conclusion
With a long sigh and a quiet sob Josephine ended her narrative.
After hearing her experiences of a year before, I could only be highly impressed with the young girl. First, of course, is her devotion to her mother and her concern over the beloved's precarious health. The extent to which Josephine would go only proved how much she did not want to risk hurting her mother, though her naivete and fear only got her ever deeper into a terrible situation. But there is no use saying she should have risked her mother finding out about her sexual relations with the boy rather than be blackmailed. We must remember that this was a sixteen-year-old girl, and a virgin before this fateful night.
Besides the nobility of her purpose, I was also impressed by the relative stability of the girl. Many another might have been deeply scarred by such an experience, emotionally and psychologically. As it was, of course, she did not quite escape the consequences of such brutality as these sexual encounters included. With the several factors combined, the form of incest with her own stepfather, the debasement and brutilization by this gang of men, and her fear that her actions would be know, possibly are know, by her mother and have hurt her, she could not be expected to be able to react sexually to her lover without awful, injurious associations cropping up. These associations, these memories of the worst part of her past, drained her of any passion she would normally be feeling in her lover's embrace. Thus the
"coldness" Bill complained of. The frigidity.
With her first full admission of the whole incident, to me, and her acceptance of it as done and in the past, she was already on her way to a recovery. Good luck was running with her, too. Investigation by my assistants has found that Josephine's mother is alive and in much better health of late. Her husband, the girl's dreaded stepfather, disappeared nearly a year ago, and she had divorced him for desertion. Mother and daughter may be back together quite soon.