They looked at each other for a moment. Then Honey laughed deliciously and said, “Of course not,” and Philip laboriously wheezed an echo of this. In cell meetings Philip was the center, but here Honey had complete charge. She led the talk into all sorts of trivial channels. Shifting restlessly in her chair, tossing her head, crossing and uncrossing her legs, Honey talked and talked. Her vitality and the wine were exhilarating. She was profane and final in her judgments of people. She jokingly accused Philip of trying to bring into the cell some “profound asses,” some “absolutely untouchable unteachables,” like a certain Sidney she mentioned, who was positively, she said, a “reconditioned pervert.” Oh, she was sure of it! And Faye Hariston (this was the wealthy widow), who “every day jumped into a barrel of peroxide,” and who, for all her efforts at femininity, showed that she was a “conditioned hermaphrodite.” Laughing gaily, Honey wanted to know what Philip was doing, recruiting people for his own pleasure? Was that what he was making of the cell, a circle of Lesbians and libertines? Unembarrassed and unsmiling, Philip only shook his head, and after a time Honey went on to something else. The atmosphere was very casual, very friendly, and I was sorry when Philip announced that he must leave. It was my cue to go too, and I got up. There was a moment’s hesitation before Philip said, “Oh, but I’ll be back! You wait for me here.” I looked at Honey, but she was already reclaiming the hat I had picked up. I thought she smiled mockingly at Philip. What Honey and I talked about after Philip’s departure, I do not know. In my notebook the next day I wrote exactly what follows. “I wish I could make out a case of moral rectitude for myself, but I cannot. What I kept thinking of last night was all the possible consequences. When Honey came and sat on the couch too close to me, I remembered all I had heard about ‘parlor whores’—that they were bold and brazen and without discrimination, and that they were bound to be diseased. I had never had more than a dozen words with her until last night, so there was no affection for me. There was only passion, and even this may not have been genuine. I half wished it were, or that I could think it so. My feeling was that her object was to arouse passion in me while she kept herself out of it and under control. She shivered and rolled her head against my shoulder and dug her nails into my thigh, but I think that it was all faked. I do not know what we talked about between times, or whether we talked about anything.