AN HONEST WOMAN
51
their families most? With our private patients, Miss Renfrew, we
can be surer that our instructions are being followed." She gave a
little smirk. "I won't need you now, Miss Brimmer," said the doctor,
washing her hands at the sink. The nurse went out, and Dottie started
to follow her, feeling herself a rather foolish figure, with her stock–
ings rolled around her ankles and her brassiere loose. "Just a minute,
Dorothy," said the doctor, turning, and fixing her with her brilliant
gaze. "Are there any questions?" Dottie hesitated; her heart's beat
quickened; she wanted, suddenly, not so much to ask, but to tell the
doctor about Dick. But to Dottie's sympathetic eye, the doctor's
lightly lined face looked tired. Moreover, she had other patients;
there was Kay still waiting outside. And supposing the doctor should
tell her to go back to the Vassar Club and pack and take the six
o'clock train home and never see Dick again?
"Medical instruction," said the doctor, kindly, with a thoughtful
look at Dottie, "can often help the patient to the fullest sexual en–
joyment. The young women who come to me today, Dorothy, have
the right to expect the deepest satisfaction from the sexual act."
Dottie scratched her jaw; the skin on her upper chest mottled. What
she wanted to ask was something a doctor might know, especially a
married doctor. She had not dared confide in Kay, and she could
certainly never tell Mother, the thing that was troubling her: what
did it mean if a man made love to you and didn't kiss you, not once,
not even at the most thrilling moment? In all the sex books they
had looked through at college, such a thing was never mentioned.
Perhaps it was too ordinary an occurrence for scientists to catalogue
or perhaps there was some natural explanation, like trench mouth
or hali, but whenever she had thought of this queer fact, during the
past days, alone in her bed at the Vassar Club, she had flushed all
over. What worried her was the fear that Dick was peculiar, what
Daddy would call a "wrong un." She could not get out of her mind
the way he had turned the lamp on her and just stood, watching.
She yearned to ask the doctor-that was really, she knew, why she
had come here-but in this gleaming surgery she felt she ought to
clothe the question in technical terminology:
"If
the man fails to
osculate?" Her dimple ruefully flashed-how could one say such a
thing? "Is there anything abnormal ...?" she began and then stared
helplessly at the tall, impassible woman.
"If
prior to the sexual
