“Oh!” she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
“Martin—oh—my dear—do you think you ought to have done that?”
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional people that would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have thought so, one time, but— Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal! Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear Leora or do anything really wrong for the world, but isn’t it wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength and— But I’ve simply got to be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There’s a woman lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern Woman’s Career.”
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. “I’ve won her,” he gloated.... Probably never has gloating been so shakily and badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”
“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”