The expression on her face when she talked about Rol was descriptive, to me, of many good qualities--of loyalty to emotions she did not understand, of untapped vehemences, of tenderness--of human characteristics she was unable to embody. She had been taught not to embody them--she had been taught such attributes were weaknesses--or she had been taught nothing concerning them at all. Her greedy mother. The cocksure extravert--her father--a man who, even from her brief account, plainly believed he knew all there was worth knowing on all topics, one who had reached final conclusions about Everything. Reached them--or was able to jump to them by a process requiring neither thought nor the machinery for evaluation. Reached them or jumped to them because his opinions were peeled like decalcomania from Precedents set up by businessmen who have graduated from good universities. I knew the type. Sometimes I feel there is hardly any other. Yvonne's dad--successful real estate man--Ivy League--New Yorker--daughter-adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that, he was, no doubt, a good guy. A good guy who had loved his elder daughter a little more (how?) than Yvonne. It was not remarkable that Yvonne exhibited the characteristics and the reactions she'd sketched for me--or those I'd witnessed. She had been packaged in the best fashion of the richest and most powerful culture of the twentieth century by people who knew and felt less of the significance of life than any other group which has arisen in the species during its past ten or twenty parasitical millenniums. In representing the highest peak of what is called civilization she presented the least sensitive arrangement of what is human. A nice bitch, then, with a father complex. When we began dancing, I was still fiddling in my mind with fragments of the dinner monologue. A couple of things should be said about it. As the reader has perceived, it represented in its way a conscious effort at self-assessment. It was a partial statement of philosophy--my own--urged upon me at that time because, under my circumstances, some review of philosophy was inevitable. When the Ghoul appears, one thinks about one's thoughts. For a while, we scarcely talked at all.