So they danced again and, by and by, as they passed me, Yvonne said, "Mind if I borrow your girl friend for a brief chitchat?" I shook my head. Yvonne danced Gwen through the other room and through the doors. They closed quietly. Moments before, I had been embarrassed by Gwen's presence--by the realization that I had wanted companionship rather than passion. Now my feelings changed, showing how incomplete my awareness of them had been. I was alone and I did not want to be. Yvonne had deprived me of my casual date. I was not precisely jealous of one woman over another, but I was distressed. And this sentiment was not relieved by the plain fact that I was responsible, through a series of negative acts, for my situation. I could have sent Yvonne packing. I could, by not nodding my head, have kept Gwen with me. On the evening before, I could have accepted Yvonne's invitation for a nightcap, or accepted the later invitation in her note to me. I'd been somewhat Olympian on both occasions--a little more detached than there was detachment in the sum of the parts of my nervous system. But what should one do? What would others do? This is a question which I sometimes test by projecting myself into others, not to examine their circumstances, but to imagine what they would do in mine. I switched off my radio. I stretched out on my divan, lighted a cigarette and cogitated. A great many of the men I know would refuse to believe or weigh the facts as they existed. Their knowledge of homo sapiens is so superficial, so repressed, or so compartmented, that they could not even assume an Yvonne would want to take a Gwen into her boudoir, let alone that one had done so. And the majority of my male friends would label any narrative of my past two days as a boast. They would doubt that I'd encountered two such extremely attractive girls in so short a space of time. Two? Three, by the reckoning of these men--for they would include the scalding stare of Marcia as a sexual coup. They would assume I'd somewhat mistaken my own libido for any description I gave of the three girls, in the bargain.