"There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time—and anybody who says different is a communist!"
I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard—and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed."
"Goodness!" Marcia said.
"Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden."
The drinks came.
Paul lifted his glass to the girl. She smiled at him warmly—with love, I suppose. What kind? It was a look of gratitude. A certain composition of her features. I compared that expression with the casual, collegiate, young-woman-of-the-world wave she had once given me from Dave Berne's double bed. A high-spirited, working-prostitute salute.
Some part of her conscience was grateful to Paul for taking her out of professional circulation. She was, I presumed, a girl with a good deal of courage—and one with taste. A sensitive girl who could—still—accommodate her mind to the objective risks of her trade. But the attitudes of many men toward her would not be acceptable. To face them, she would have to sell pieces of her inner person. Paul had rescued her from that and her eyes thanked him.
But, far more, Marcia's face expressed a maternal sentiment—warm and enveloping. He was, in a sense, her baby. Emotionally immature, romantic, and hence naïve, he had taken her for what she was not. She had played up to his assumption as an older woman to a child. In seducing him, she had seduced herself. She had adopted him as the symbol of the values she had discarded, the values that were now most precious to her because they were lost.
When I thought that over, I realized it was the point of extreme hazard in their relationship. Not social pressures, but the pressures of emotions—of instincts of which neither was conscious—would be the explosive condition of their two lives. The dangerous day would be the day when he matured sufficiently to dissociate the need to love from the need to be loved. In her case, the time would come then, too—when he demanded no more mothering in bowels or brain or heart. But it might come sooner—when she tired of that one function, or extended it, or spoiled its object, or devoured it, or cast it out for its own good.