But thirty minutes later she gave me a smile that made me not so sure she was offended. And the incident seemed to increase, rather than dampen, the warmth of her attitude toward me. It was unpardonable, with Wyn gone so short a time, but I had no strength to resist the inexorable attentions of a woman I loved. When she came to me in negligee late one night a week later, I became Summer's lover. I have said it was partly Summer's fault, and the sequence of events would make it appear almost entirely her fault. This is not true; and I found out several years later why it is not true. My inexcusable affair with Summer lasted for about a year, before the conversation occurred which caused me to terminate it abruptly. I had just entered the parlor, where Summer was curled in a big chair, reading. "I don't see any reason for our not loving each other, if we really do, Don," she said petulantly. "Wyn says he's my husband, but I don't feel that he is. Why should I be tied by a marriage ceremony I don't know anything about yet?" I could not answer, for I was looking at her through new eyes. Her tone of voice had been so like that of an indignant child that it awakened me to something I should have seen before. How like an adolescent girl she was, really! The pale gold hair framed a young face. Despite the rondures of her figure, there was a looseness about the way her legs were attached to her pelvis, giving her frame that impression of hollowness that is frequent among slender young virgins. In the seven years I had known her, how could I ever have built up in my mind the picture of her as a mature woman? When I thought about that sudden protestation of hers, made after we had lived as man and wife for a year, it seemed to me that it could only have arisen from remorse at such a situation. But it was neither this nor the fact that I was wronging her and Wyn that caused me to resolve then and there that never again would I so much as kiss her. It was that she was too young! I did not waver in that resolve, from that time on. But I thought a great deal about this matter: I had known Summer for seven years and she had been a woman when I first saw her. Yet her youthful appearance now made it impossible that she should have been adult then. Surely my memory did not play me wrong in picturing the Summer Storm I had seen that night in the park; indeed, the picture of her was burned indelibly on my mind. She must have, in the interim, become slighter, even smaller. Oddly, this slenderizing process, once I noticed it, seemed reluctant to stop. The bathroom scales proved that she was losing weight slowly, but in her appearance the decline progressed much more rapidly. She began to get leggy and angular and she completely lost the once-voluptuous contours of her body, despite all the milk and starchy foods I could feed her. Nor was it that she lost appetite. She ate voraciously.