With face gloomily averted, Dee pursued her main preoccupation. "Do you feel when you kiss a man as if all your nerves were strung wires and an electric shock went flaming along them and then died out and left you plah?"
"Oh!" jeered Pat softly. "And you claim that you've never been really kissed."
"I haven't. But he—he lifted me in his arms once. And I felt his heart beating.... And then afterwards, do you hate and despise yourself for letting it affect you that way?" queried the neophyte of passion, interpreting dimly the sharp revulsion of her undefeated maidenhood against its own first weakening toward surrender.
"No. Of course I don't. Why should I?" Pat reflected. "I have been ashamed, though—a little. But that was because of what someone said to me about it. A friend. He made it seem cheap."
"Cheap? Oh, no; it wasn't cheap. But that's what I felt; that ashamedness afterward. As strongly as I felt the other. Stronger."
Instinctive psychologist enough to know that the rebound is never as powerful as the impact, Pat disbelieved this. "Just the same I think you're taking a big chance marrying Jimmy. Why don't you marry the—the thriller?"
"Don't!" snapped Dee. "You're making it cheap now."
"But why don't you?" persisted the junior.
"I couldn't."