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nobody had ever had the imagination to give it a name. It was just a machine, nothing
     like this glamorous lovable Penelope. Sitting beside George in the front seat of Penelope,
     Marjorie felt twenty-five years old.
    The dance was a delirium. The very air in the college gymnasium seemed to be blue
     and gauzy like her dress, and when she danced she seemed to be standing still, wrapped
     in George’s strong arms, while the great bare walls and the handsome officers and
     the beautiful girls and the punching bags and monkey bars and wrestling mats and rowing
     machines wheeled round and round her gently in time to the music.
    On the way home, George stopped the car in Bronx Park, in a leafy dark nook filled
     with smells of springtime; and Marjorie found that there was more to kissing than
     the pecking wet foolishness of party games, that this touch of mouth to mouth could
     be sweet. It didn’t seem wrong to kiss George. He was gentle and kind. Between kisses
     he poured out his heart to her. He had tried for weeks to forget her, he said, convinced
     that she was too young for him. But it had been impossible. He had invited her to
     the dance to prove to himself that she couldn’t fit into his life. Instead he was
     falling more and more in love with her. Who could deny that she had been the loveliest
     girl at the dance, the most poised, the most intelligent? What did age matter, when
     a girl had everything?
    “Oh, you’ve just gone crazy, George.”
    “Yes. I’ll never get over it either. I’ll wait five years, Marjorie, ten, whatever
     you say. You’re my girl. There’ll never be anyone else.”
    Hearing such words, Marjorie surrendered herself to the pleasant process of kissing
     George without further fear. She had never experienced such bliss. How could she deny
     the evidence of her senses? For her, too, there would never be anyone else.
    In the months that followed, George consolidated his position. He lived only a few
     subway stops from Marjorie. Walks in the park, movie dates, and casual meetings at
     ice cream parlors or at the neighborhood library were simple to arrange. George soon
     came to enjoy a great added advantage: Mrs. Morgenstern openly opposed him, saying
     that Marjorie would do much better one of these days. This would probably have been
     enough in itself to make the girl adore him. But George did have persisting attractions
     in his own right. He was—at least by Marjorie’s sixteen-year-old standards—adult,
     witty, gracious, and suave. He had Penelope. And he thrilled Marjorie as she had never
     been thrilled before. In time their relationship included some rather warm necking
     sessions. But he was considerate. The advance of intimacy was very slow, and each
     step seemed natural when it happened. The necking was often preceded by George’s reading
     aloud of some poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which he did quite well in a husky
     voice.
    Then Marjorie moved to Central Park West.
    She smiled brightly at Sandy when George rang the doorbell, and hobbled to answer
     it before her mother could stop her.
    George stood in the doorway in the usual gray suit with the usual red tie, holding
     in his hand the battered brown hat, the only one he owned, with the threads coming
     loose on the band. It still gave Marjorie a thrill to open the door to George, though
     he no longer quite stunned her with his godlike masculinity. His smile was the same—wide,
     sweet, a little more melancholy than it had been before he had given up bacteria for
     auto supplies. She felt a bit ashamed because Sandy Goldstone was in the dining room
     wearing riding clothes. “Hi, George. Come in.”
    His eye fell on the taped ankle. “My God, pooch—”
    “It’s nothing, nothing at all. Sprained it a bit. Come on, you’re just in time for
     coffee and cake.” She took his hand and pressed it warmly, trying to tell him with
     this gesture that the handsome young stranger he was about to meet didn’t