"Yes, Lilly," so suddenly that something seemed to catch at her heartbeat, but after a pang she let it stand. Let Lilly's Zoe dawn upon you through this rather typical conversation between them, the night before the graduation from grade school: "Lilly, am I beautiful?" "Why, yes, Zoe, so long as you remain fine and unspoiled by it. That is the rarest kind of loveliness--inner beauty." "I don't mean that kind. Am I pretty--for boys to look at?" "You are pretty enough as little girls go, if that is what you mean." "Is it wrong to have beaus?" "That all depends. Why?" "Oh, I just wanted to know." Silence. "A boy in my class, Gerald Prang, says he is my beau." "Silly fellow." "Ethel Watts has one. They kiss." "That's horrid." "Is it horrid for me and Ethel to kiss?" "No, Zoe, you know it isn't." "Would it be horrid for me and Gerald--Gerald and I--to kiss?" "Yes." "Why?" "Listen, Zoe, a new word. The most beautiful and the most horrible thing in the world can be sex." "Sex?" "Yes, dear. We haven't used the term in our talks--yet." "Isn't it nice?" "That lies with you." "Then what is sex?" "Zoe, the world of human beings is divided into two great classes, isn't it? Boys and girls." "Oh, I know! It's me and Gerald." "In a way, yes, but--" "If me and Ethel kiss, it isn't sex, but if me and Gerald kiss, it is." "If only you wouldn't keep your mind running ahead. I want to be so sure you are going to understand. That's what our botany and physiology study has been for. To prepare you to understand. Now take the kingdom of flowers, a rose, for instance--" "Begin with us, Lilly. I don't want to hear any botany." "But, Zoe--" "Storks cannot bring babies, can they?" "No. No. Who put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear--out of lo--out of the union of the sexes." "Lilly, you are all trembling." She took her daughter's face between her hands, her eyes probing and yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones. "It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It's only when we make something dark and shameful of nature's methods that we are apt to misunderstand and to err." "Did you err, Lilly?" "How?" "With him?" "Who?" "Penny." "Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what marriage meant. Ignorance!" "How funny to hear that--word." "What word?" "Father." "Zoe! Zoe! Have I made it clear to you about him? How good--how kind--how wronged by me?" "You are always so afraid I won't understand that. Why shouldn't I?"