"What are you trying to prove now?"
I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men belong in it."
"What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"
"Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do—in spite of church, law, state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint they can dream up, consciously?"
"Some men—maybe."
"All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't know where they are in space—people as ignorant of simple, cultural fact as the average American college graduate—obviously cannot know anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."
Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"
"Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego, or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides—all the other people here do have your attitude. And I'm not a lunatic."
"You think, though"—her eyes went burningly around the room in search of effective illustration—"it would be perfectly all right for me to get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it, too! Nobody should mind that—?"
She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.