Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon' did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy). But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh, yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?" "Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have twins at nineteen--maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.