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little auto accessories store in the Bronx. George wasn’t
     happy about spending his days in the dusty gloom of Southern Boulevard under the booming
     rattling El, selling fan belts and hub caps to gray-faced Bronxites, when his mind
     was full of marvels like amoebas and spirochetes. But there was no help for it. He
     grimly saved a fragment of his allowance each week (he was getting no salary for helping
     to keep the large Drobes family alive); for he was resolved to go back and finish
     his training in bacteriology, even at the age of fifty.
    He was by no means the first boy who had dated Marjorie. She had gone to well-chaperoned
     schoolgirlish dances and parties since her twelfth year. Around her fifteenth birthday,
     with official if reluctant parental approval, Marjorie had arrayed herself in lipstick,
     rouge, perfume, eyebrow-black, brassiere, girdle, silk stockings, and stylish clothes,
     and plunged out once for all into the sea of dating. Mrs. Morgenstern fought off this
     debut with great energy to the very end. At first, when Marjorie was a little over
     fourteen, she objected to rouge. Then she gave in on rouge and objected to lipstick.
     Then she yielded on lipstick and declared war on the eyebrow pencil. She kept up a
     fierce rear-guard action for a long time against any kind of clothes that looked grown-up,
     the only kind Marjorie was interested in. But the mother’s resistance collapsed when
     Marjorie reached fifteen. Any further fight was hopeless. Whatever Marjorie’s deficiencies
     in experience and common sense, she looked as womanly as her mother did. Mrs. Morgenstern
     turned Marjorie loose, hoping for the best. It was the way things were done nowadays.
    Marjorie immediately ran into the furtive sex fumbling that all boys her own age considered
     natural and in fact obligatory. She was upset the first couple of times it happened.
     But her instinct, backed up by her mother’s vague but horrid warnings, made her reject
     these advances with a strong arm. She found dates disappointing once the first thrill
     of having them was past. The pleasure lay mostly in the fact that she was doing grown-up
     things, and in the theatrical fun of dressing and painting herself. Most of the boys
     she met were pimpled gangling fools. They kept trying to kiss and hug and paw her;
     and when she fought off these compliments, they sulked. None of them remotely tempted
     her to try out the sex excitements promised in movies and magazine stories. It often
     seemed to her, in the first eight months of her fifteenth year, that all males were
     nasty louts, and that she would have to live and die an old maid for her fastidiousness.
     She faced the prospect cheerfully. It was during this time of her life that she worked
     up a number of bright arguments against marriage, and made fun of sex, and declared
     that instead of becoming some man’s dishwasher and cook she was going to be a career
     woman.
    She then met George Drobes.
    He came into her life via the Bronx YMHA. Marjorie went there to see an amateur production
     of
Desire under the Elms
, in the company of a boy whose name was now blotted from memory, but whom she remembered
     for buck teeth and wet hands. After the play there was dancing. George Drobes cut
     in on Marjorie. Her first impression of him was that he had pleasantly dry palms.
     Then she realized, with a little shock, that she was dancing with an adult, not a
     boy. She had danced with men before—uncles, and aging cousins in their twenties—but
     this was the first time a grown man had approached her in the open arena of life.
    George cut in on her several times, and eventually asked for her telephone number,
     having danced her out into a quiet corridor. Marjorie was dazzled. She had not yet
     grown to her full height; George was a head taller than herself. She did not see the
     glasses and the reddened nose; she did not hear the snuffle. She saw an earnest, well-spoken
     man of twenty paying