With him she had never been afraid, not even from the first. The fact that it was she he had chosen established her as a woman of importance, if only to one man; and his passion had awakened undreamed-­of possibilities. At the difficult beginning of their love-­making he had been the soul of tact and caution, so unlike other men she had heard of. Under his caresses she opened up to him and for the first time in her life came into her own: alive, aware, confident of the future and her role in it. In a matter of weeks she changed. No one could have told her in her teens that she would one day sleep with a man she was not married to, but she had slept with John Grandin, wanting it as much as he did, with no sense of sin whatever (despite her mother’s fearful warnings), scarcely even a sense of surprise, except the surprise of discovering that the act of love was by no means an easy matter.

At first this had consisted of hours and aching hours of straining together, yearning for the next step yet dreading what it might be, then fancying in herself a hopeless despairing in­adequacy. She remembered one terrible night when suddenly she had broken away from his embrace and turned to the wall, to sob out her grief and shame alone; and when he, astonished, had pulled her to him again and tenderly whispered, “Darling . . . what’s the matter,” her tears flooded his shoulder as she poured forth her misery because the act of love had gone forward so painfully, with no hope even yet that it would be attained: “I’m not right for you, there must be something wrong with me . . .” But he had comforted her, whispering, “Darling, don’t you know I love you besides that? It doesn’t matter about tonight . . .” Only much later did she realize fully how gentle, controlled, and considerate he had been. Regardless of her reticences or inexperience, most men would have carried through quickly, brought the matter home and achieved their satisfaction, with small regard for the girl they might be hurting or losing. Not he; he had loved her enough to wait. By some almost feminine intuition he seemed to know how it was with her, and he couldn’t have been kinder or more patient with her ignorance. It was one of the things she had always been grateful to him for. At that most important moment of her life he had not failed her; and the result was: she fell in love with him, and had never fallen out of love since.