First, because of her rule, she had to realize that sex without the hope of developing a relationship was something that she could imagine so carefully that, on most occasions, she could dismiss it from her thoughts like an extra portion of dessert. When it wasn’t a thought, but something physical, it became another matter. She had Roberts’ approval to handle it as she wanted, but when she could look at a man in her room and know that there would be someone else before she would see him again, the pleasure of the act was diminished to a simple throe she was glad to have done. Second, the desire not to break what amounted to a promise to Dr. Roberts gave her a strength with men that she had never used before. Sometimes she told them about it, asking them to respect it and her, and interestingly, the few who said they were willing to try raised serious doubts about themselves in her mind. In the eight months the rule stayed in effect, she was able to generate a wariness that served her, but also began to frighten her. Roberts released her from the promise, but she did not release herself for another two months. She met a fellow she liked and went with him for nearly a month, then broke it off when he mentioned something he wanted them to do in the following summer. “I don’t want to get serious,” she told Roberts.

She was twenty then. Her life stayed in good order, as she wanted to put it, through her twenty-first birthday. One evening in the cafeteria at Port Smith College she met a boy of eighteen, who asked her to go out. At the next session she told Roberts about it, and that she wanted to see the boy. Roberts told her to go ahead.

It lasted until July, and for the first time since Jimmy, she felt something she wanted to call love. The boy moved in. He was majoring in math—he didn’t know why—and worked in a pathology laboratory downtown. There was no question in her mind about his age: he would set the alarm so he could read before breakfast, and on the weekends he took them incredible distances in search of particular movies, and once he suggested a trip to New York to see a Charlie Chaplin double bill. She began to have her doubts when she saw in his devotion to her much of what she herself once had tried to bring to love. She promptly began asserting herself to the point where there was nothing left of him. She told Dr. Roberts that she would break it off if the boy proposed marriage. When that came, she kept to her word.