It seemed impossible for Preachers or devout Brothers to say “virgin” as casually as they did other words; they gloated over it, toyed with it, rolled it about their tongues and tasted the full flavor of it before it slid drippingly from their lips with an amazing clarity of pronunciation. Usually they accompanied it with a doleful sigh. I thought then that the sigh was from excess of piety, and I thought that their eyes shone and their breath came a little faster from the same cause, that these things were possibly manifestations of God, and I was greatly impressed. But I am older now and I know better.
When I became old enough to understand what was meant by virginity, and to understand that it was something more than a badge of the angels, I understood also many other things that had hitherto been mysteries. I knew then what was in the mind of one of the Brothers, an extraordinarily devout man with an astounding knowledge of the wishes of God and the manners and customs of Heaven, when he stopped me on the street one day and asked me what, if anything, had happened on a recent hay ride to Blumeyer’s Ford and back by members of our social set.
“Did the boys and girls sit close together?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We had to. We were on a hay wagon.”
“Did you boys sit right up against them?”
I told him we did, and in my youthful innocence I remarked that I had been compelled to sit so close to one girl that we could hardly tell our legs apart. The old man drew a sharp breath, sighed and his eyes glistened. He repeated the word “legs” with gusto, he gloated over it, and then he said:
“You sat so close to her that your legs touched? Your leg touched hers? Your leg was right up against her?”
“Yes, sir. I had to.”
“The leg of a young virgin!” mused the old devil. “That was wicked. It is wicked to think of the legs of a virgin. God will punish you.”
He went away muttering to himself. I was disgusted, not at his ideas, because I had practically the same thought about virgins that he did, and so did most of the other boys of the town, but at his manner. Here was an old man who had set himself up as a mundane representative of the Lord, who told me whom to worship and how to worship Him, who held daily communion with God and received messages from Him touching on my conduct, gloating and trembling because a boy had sat with his leg against the leg of a girl in the forced confinement of a hay ride. God knows what is happening to him if he is alive in these days of short skirts and silk stockings.