That highly charged phrase cropped up occasionally in whispered conversations with other girls my age, and more frequently in those insipid dime novels Phil and I read. In our early teens, we girls weren’t entirely sure what the fate worse than death was, but by the time I graduated from Miss Sumner’s Female Academy, I had a pretty good notion.

My speculations were gleaned from snatched of giggled conversation behind the stacks in the library when we were supposed to be studying or reading improving works. These ideas were further substantiated by contributions from home.

We Everett children had a series of governesses in our later years from whom we learned a great deal, Miss Parmlee in particular, who took it upon herself to educate me and Eugenie in the ways of the world. In hushed tones, she told us of young girls led astray in dark alleys who ended up in Persian harems, or maidens who took that first drop of liquor and gave themselves over to all manner of licentiousness. She was rarely more specific than that. I tried to look up licentiousness in the dictionary and remained mystified because I didn’t know how to spell it so I could look it up. (I told this story to my husband. He laughed so hard I thought he would do himself an injury.)

We gathered from Miss Parmlee’s dire tales and dark looks that men were depraved beasts who Took What They Wanted from innocent virgins and left them ruined forever. She frightened me so much that I was over sixteen before I left Charlie Rigmore kiss me under the mistletoe. Even then, I worried for days if I was going to find myself “that way,” all because I let him plant a hurried kiss on my cheek while the others were singing Christmas carols in the church.

We didn’t regret Miss Parmlee’s sudden departure. Mother claimed she fired our governess because she was caught dipping in the cooking sherry. Phil told us the real reason, how she let herself into his room one night and, as Phil put it, “bothered me.” As that incident is not the direct subject of this narrative, we will allow it to rest.

Later, Mother sat Eugenie and me down and tried to explain the facts of life to us, but she spoke in tongues and we found it perplexing. She carried on about bees taking honey from blossom to blossom, asked us if we understood her meaning, then beat it from the room before we recovered enough to ask her any questions.

I received the remainder of my knowledge about love and life from the other girls at the female academy. Someone had a distant relative – it’s always a distant relative – who let a man take advantage of her and ended up in the family way. We giggle and tittered and shivered with delicious excitement in anticipation of our own initiation into lust and desire, and if we were lucky, love. Sex was a popular schoolgirl subject even in those protective days, and don’t let anyone tell you different.