So I glanced at her book. I had already noticed the jacket. It was _Ape and Essence_ by Aldous Huxley. She had been reading with a slight frown. But now I saw that the jacket did not fit the book, which was thicker than Mr. Huxley's post-atomic predictions. The jacket, then, was camouflage--for a larger book with maroon binding. What sort of reading, I wondered, would a glamorous young woman hide behind Aldous Huxley? And, abruptly, I knew: the Kinsey Report. I leaned back and verified it. This amused me. The people of Miami Beach, where I had lived in the winter, and the people of New York, whom I had encountered in the spring, had been busy for both seasons with Dr. Kinsey's refreshing work. It was, at least, refreshing to me.... I am interested in psychology. For a quarter of a century I have known, by way of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Stekel, Ellis, and many others, the same facts, in comparable orders of magnitude as those which Dr. Kinsey elicited by his scientific cross-questioning of cross sections. My own experience of life, taken with the confidences of my associates, has merely confirmed what others have noted. I have published such data in my books, years before Kinsey. And all that time I have reflected with a hooting pique upon the unconquerable illusions of Americans. What I have long known to be true, and often written down, they have refused to consider as real. Until the first of the Kinsey Reports, all erotic activity except that mechanical minimum permitted by state legislatures has been regarded, even by most enlightened citizens, either as an accident carefully hidden in their own lives, or else as the perverted behavior of persons who, eventually, would land on the couches of psychiatrists--if not in prison. It is the most depraved truth about us. Kinsey--with the august reputation of Rockefeller money to give his findings the one sort of credibility acceptable to Americans--had accomplished what hundreds of psychologists and scores of writers like myself had been unable to do: he had convinced multitudes that the sexual behavior of people is mammalian in every respect. He had shown, where we had failed, that erotic activity of some sort is universal, that the earlier and more vigorously such activities are commenced, the more potent and sexually capable its practitioners become--that use, not restraint (as the "pure" have decreed), develops the nerves, capillaries and muscles of the sexual organs precisely as it does those of other organs and that what we call sins and perversions are as ubiquitous as what we call normal sex acts. He had made an ass of the law and a fool of the church and held up an odious society in such a light that its heathen taboos and wholehearted hypocrisies were at long last more visible than the foul rags covering them.