AN HONEST WOMAN
39
motives to her. In the afternoon light, moveover, she seemed quite
appetizing, in her chipmunk style, with her brown friendly eyes gleam–
ing with quiet fun and her lashes a-flutter whenever she looked at
John. A lot of it was clothes, of course, for thanks to a clever mother,
Dottie dressed to perfection: she was the only one of the Boston
contingent at Vassar who knew better than to wear tweeds and
mufflers, which made the poor things look like gaunt, elderly govern–
esses out for a Sunday hike. According to John, her deep-bosomed
figure, as revealed by her bias-cut blouses, gave promise of sensuality.
And Kay, despite what she knew of Dick, could not help but be a
little impressed by what Dottie disclosed to her in the bedroom: it
seemed that Dick had actually told her to go and get fitted with
a pessary!
There was a certain protocol in these matters, as Kay well ap–
preciated from her own history with John, and no man who was a
. gentleman (which Dick in his queer way still was) would send
a girl to a birth-control doctor unless he planned to sleep with her
regularly, over a considerable period.
If
it were only a casual affair,
he would feel himself bound to use condoms or practice coitus inter–
ruptus. The expense was a determining factor: no gentleman would
expect a girl to put up the doctor's fee, plus the price of the pessary
and the jelly and the douche-bag, if he were not going to sleep with
her long enough for her to recover her investment. It was simpler
to buy Trojans by the dozen and not feel bound to the girl. Why,
Kay herself was still using suppositories three days after her marriage,
though she and John had slept together for ages.
This etiquette, John assured Kay, who in tum passed it on to a
gladdened Dottie, was well understood by all the young men of his
acquaintance. Even Dick, who was thirty, and had lived abroad for
so long, would not have sent Dottie to the doctor just to gratify a
whim, John argued. In the first place, a man did not transfer the
burden of contraception to .a woman unless he felt able to trust her:
too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man's relying on a
woman's assurance that the contraceptive was in. Secondly, there
was the question of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with
her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche-bag
safe from Mother's prying eyes; therefore the man took over the
custody of these articles. He kept them in his bureau drawer or his
