“Bunny,” she said, “my mother and father are having a row at home, and it’s horrid there.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” said he, sympathetically.
“Let’s go somewhere and have supper—away from everything. You come, and it’ll be my party.”
So they drove for an hour or so, and climbed by a winding road to the top of a hill, and there was a café, with a terrace looking out over a bay and a rocky shoreline that would have been famous if it had been in Italy. They ate supper, and chatted about school affairs, and Eunice told him about her home-life and how someone had written her mother a letter revealing that her father had paid a lot of money to some woman, and Mrs. Hoyt was furious, because why should men do things that made it necessary for them to pay money?
The sun set over the ocean, and the lights came out along the shore, and a big full moon behind the hills; and Eunice said, “Do you like me a little bit, Bunny?” He answered that of course he did, and she said, “But you don’t show it ever.” “Well,” he explained, “I never know quite what to make of you, because you always kid me;” and to that she said, “I know, Bunny, I’m a horrid mean thing, but the truth is, I just do that to keep my courage up. I’m afraid of you, too, because you’re serious, and I’m just a silly chatterbox, and I have to make a show.” So after that Bunny was able to enjoy the party.
They got into the car and drove again. The road ran through a tangle of sand-dunes, high up above the ocean. “Oh, this is lovely!” said Eunice, and when they came to a place where the ground was firm she ran the car off the pavement and parked it. “Let’s go and watch the ocean,” she said. “There’s a rug in the back.” So Bunny got the rug out, and they walked over the dunes, and sat on top of one, and listened to the waves below; and Eunice smoked a cigarette, and scolded Bunny because he was a horrid little Puritan that wouldn’t keep her company. Presently a man came walking by, and glanced at them as he passed, and Eunice said, “Have you got a gun?” And when he said that he hadn’t, she remarked, “You’re supposed to bring a gun nowadays when you go on a petting party.” Bunny had not realized that this was exactly a petting party, but you can see that it would not have been polite of him to say so.
He listened while she told him about bandits who were making a business of holding up couples parked by the roadside; some were beastly to the girls, and what would Bunny do if one of them were suddenly to appear? Bunny said he didn’t know, but of course he’d defend a woman the best he could. “But I don’t want you to get shot,” said Eunice. “We’ve a scandal already in our family.” So she said, “Let’s get lost, Bunny;” and he gathered up the rug and they wandered over the dunes—a long way from the road and from everything; and in one of the hollows, a still nest where the sand was soft and smooth, she told him to spread the rug again, and there they sat, hid from everything save the round yellow moon, which has looked down upon millions and millions of such scenes, and never yet betrayed a confidence.
They sat close together, and Eunice rested her head against Bunny’s shoulder and whispered, “Do you care for me a little bit?” He assured her that he did, but she said, no, he must think she was a horrid bold thing; and when he declared that he didn’t, she said, “Then why don’t you kiss me?” He began to kiss her, but she wasn’t satisfied—he didn’t mean it, she said; and suddenly she whispered, “Bunny, I don’t believe you’ve ever really loved a girl before!”
He admitted that he had not. “I’ve always known you were a queer boy,” she said. “What is the matter?” Bunny said he didn’t quite know; he was trembling violently, because he had never had anything like this happen to him, and several different emotions clamored at the same time, and which one should he follow? “Let me teach you, Bunny,” whispered the girl; and when he did not answer at once, she put her lips upon his, in a long kiss that made him dizzy. He murmured faintly that something might happen, she might get into trouble; but she told him not to worry about that, she knew about those things and had taken the needed precautions.
II
Such was the way of Bunny’s initiation into the adult life. Gone were the days of happy innocence when he could be content to sit holding hands with Rosie Taintor. “Holding hands” was now walking on a slippery ledge, over a dark abyss where pleasure and pain were so mingled you could hardly tell them apart. Bunny was frightened by the storm of emotion which seized upon him, and still more by the behavior of the girl in his arms; a kind of frenzy shook her, she clung to him in a convulsion of excitement, half sobbing, half laughing, with little cries as of an animal in pain. And Bunny must share this delirium, she would not have it otherwise, she was furious in her exactions, the mistress of these
