We walked together out into the living room where our four parents sat on four chairs talking. Waiters were putting food on the table. Miss Rose still had her pocketbook in her hands. Mr. Percy had started smoking. Mother was dealing out the charm and Daddy had put on his patrician posture. They all knew what they were doing and I, Rhoda Katherine Manning Martin, knew what I was going to do. “We’re leaving,” I said. “We want to be alone. We’re going over to the campus to the KA house. You talk all you want to. We’re leaving.”

“Lunch is ready,” Mother said. Horror overwhelmed her, horror lined her brow. I was leaving the room with a man. I was going off and do it. Right there with her watching and Daddy not doing a thing to stop me and two strangers for witnesses and the waiters laying silver beside the napkins. All the years she had bathed me four times a day and shuddered at the slightest hint of my sexuality and covered me up with clothes and underpants and stockings and brassieres and girdles were disappearing before her eyes. “Don’t you want to eat your lunch?”

“Let them go, Ariane,” Daddy said. “They’re young. They want to be alone.”