“You won’t hurt me,’Gene? You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, honey? If anything happens—” she said drowsily.
He seized the straw of her suggestion.
“I won’t be the first. I won’t be the one to begin you. I’ve never started a girl off,” he babbled, aware vaguely that he was voicing an approved doctrine of chivalry. “See here, Louise!” he shook her—she seemed drugged. “You’ve got to tell me before—. I won’t do THAT! I may be a bad fellow, but nobody can say I ever did that. Do you hear!” His voice rose shrilly; his face worked wildly; he was hardly able to speak.
“I say, do you hear? Am I the first one, or not? You’ve got to answer! Did you ever—before?”
She looked at him lazily. She smiled.
“No,” she said.
“I may be mad, but I won’t do that.” He had become inarticulate; his voice went off into a speechless jargon. Gasping, stammering, with contorted and writhing face, he sought for speech.
She rose suddenly, and put her warm arms comfortingly around him. Soothing and caressing him, she drew him down on her breast. She stroked his head, and talked quietly to him.
“I know you wouldn’t, honey. I know you wouldn’t. Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. Why, you’re all excited, dear. There. Why, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re high-strung, honey. That’s what it is. You’re a bundle of nerves.”
He wept soundlessly into her arm.
He became quieter. She smiled, and kissed him softly.
“Put on your clothes,” said Louise. “We ought to get started if we’re going out there.”
In his confusion he tried to draw on a pair of Mrs. Bowden’s cast— off pumps. Louise laughed richly, and thrust her fingers through his hair.
At the Navy Yard, they could not find the Bowdens nor Max Isaacs. A young sailor took them over a destroyer. Louise went up a railed iron ladder with an emphatic rhythm of her shapely thighs. She showed her legs. She stared impudently at a picture of a chorus lady, cut from the Police Gazette. The young sailor
