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court to herself, a girl fifteen and a half, hardly past hanging
     by her heels in playgrounds, popping bubble gum, and cutting out pictures of stars
     in movie magazines. George had a narrow bony face, thin lips, and bushy dark hair.
     His smile was sweet and faintly melancholy. She gave him her telephone number, and
     for a while they went on with a halting delicious conversation. But he was too big,
     too powerful, too flopping a fish for her inexpert hands. She could think of nothing
     but her own age, and at last she blurted it out. George was astounded; he had taken
     her for eighteen, he said. The conversation died. He took her back to the wet-handed
     boy and cut in on her no more. Marjorie could hardly sleep that night for thinking
     of George, and hating herself for mishandling him.
    During the next couple of weeks, whenever the telephone rang, crimson rays seemed
     to shoot out of it, and Marjorie would fling herself at it. But it was never the marvelous
     twenty-year-old man. Then one rainy evening almost a month later, when she had given
     up hope, he really did call. He was clumsy and abrupt. Did she remember him? Was she
     well? Would she come with him to a formal dance at the City College gymnasium? Marjorie
     answered yes, yes, yes, in painful gasps—and it was over. She stood with the receiver
     in her hands, numb with joy.
    She had to tell her mother, of course. It took Mrs. Morgenstern only a few minutes
     to extract from the shaky girl everything she knew about George Drobes. The mother
     was less impressed than Marjorie had been to learn that he was twenty years old, a
     college man, and a bacteriologist; nor was she quite so thrilled at the girl’s being
     invited to a college formal dance before reaching sixteen. “If this fellow is as marvelous
     as you say, why should he want to bother with a baby like you?”
    “Mom, you’ll never look at the good side of anything. Isn’t it just possible that
     he could like me?”
    The mother at last gave a grudging consent to the date, and even became a little infected
     with the girl’s exhilaration when they shopped for an evening dress in downtown department
     stores. Marjorie thought about nothing but the dance for two weeks. There were tremendous
     debates over hair-dos and makeup and color of shoes and exposure of bosom. The day
     of the dance was cyclonic in the Morgenstern household, with Marjorie fretting and
     foaming at the center. Then all at once, an hour before George was supposed to arrive,
     quiet ensued. The eternity passed, the time came, the doorbell rang; and she tripped
     to answer it, a shiny-eyed child of fifteen and a half, with a bosom precociously
     full and panting under the flouncy blue tulle of her dress.
    She almost fainted when she saw George. He was in an army officer’s uniform, all glittering
     brass buttons and brown male power and glory. He himself had been too nervous on the
     telephone to mention that it was a Reserve Officers Training Corps dance.
    The military apparition overpowered her family. Mrs. Morgenstern was more polite than
     she had ever been to one of Marjorie’s escorts. The father stared at George with something
     like awe, and said nothing. Marjorie’s younger brother, Seth, a lively urchin of eleven
     whose face shone from a harsh last-minute scrubbing, kept saluting and prancing in
     circles, humming
The Stars and Stripes Forever
. As for Marjorie, the only thought that pierced her fog of delight was that the living
     room was a wretched cramped hole and the furniture terribly dowdy; she couldn’t understand
     why she hadn’t noticed it long ago.
    There was no end to the wonders of George Drobes. It turned out that he had his father’s
     car for the occasion, an old Chevrolet painted a bright false green, which he drove
     with practiced ease. Moreover he had a name for the car, Penelope. She thought this
     was an incredibly clever and whimsical touch. Her father drove a new blue Buick, but