Mrs. Prentiss was a remarkably handsome young woman. She was somewhat educated and she had a fair degree of intellectual sensitivity. In telling me she had not understood what I was saying she had implied a considerable degree of comprehension and a reluctance to deal with whatever it was that she had gathered from my words. She was "mostly" frigid (an intriguing expression) in many different ways.
In any sexual encounter she would undoubtedly barricade herself from biological design with common artifact—and half the Pharmacopoeia, besides. She was avid and did not know it. I could see—as the reader has seen with me, no doubt—that her domestic debacle was the result of a projection of her own guilt-sense. She was a nubile dancer. But she used her dancing rather meanly—as a sly and enjoyable confession to herself which, she thought, was the most that society would permit of dancing. She was somewhat spoiled and very selfish—extremely prissy in the real, felt sense of the word: a bitch. Nobody, that is to say, existed for her excepting in that they existed for her desires.
She had moved to a room beside me. She had tried to lead me—at first—on the dance floor. She had thrust the eyes and lips of her psyche into the brunette cashier's hair without caring in the least for the brunette or for any woman or for what happened to others. She had attributed the libidinous gesture to my imagination, when I had brought it to light. She had failed to add anything but frustration to the life of a man about whom I had heard, so far, what I regarded as almost nothing but good.
She had bought her world and was willing to pay in cash to keep it the way she wanted it—but not willing to pay in a dime's worth of herself. She needed a lesson. For there were nice things about her.
The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities—of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness—of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them—she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses—or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert—her father—a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them—or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities.
I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad—successful real estate man—Ivy League—New Yorker—daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne.
It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me—or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human.
A nice bitch, then, with a father complex.