Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk Page A

the room, white and hot.
     She was wet through with perspiration. Below the window was the pool, crowded with
     hilarious young people. There were some especially good-looking boys, she observed,
     their hair black and disorderly from the water. She stopped in her pacing and fingered
     her new swim suit. It was the latest style: flesh-colored rubber, perfectly decent,
     yet at twenty feet giving one the look of total nakedness. The room was really unbearably
     hot.
    There was dancing after dinner on the terrace overlooking the sea. She danced for
     hours with Sandy. They went for a stroll on the beach in the moonlight afterward;
     and when they had rounded a bend that hid them from the hotel they sat and talked
     idly in the gloom, looking at the stars and streaming sand through their fingers,
     while the white surf at their feet tumbled and roared. After a while Marjorie hesitantly
     ran her finger across the back of Sandy’s hand. The effect was explosive. When they
     walked back to the hotel half an hour later their relationship was advanced about
     to the high point that Marjorie had reached with George Drobes. She and Sandy were
     both dizzy, confused, uncertain, exhilarated, and extremely pleased with themselves.

Chapter 5.
SANDY’S AMBITIONS
    Sandy’s tan Pontiac convertible was quite a change from Penelope: red leather seats,
     gleaming chrome knobs, and a motor that at sixty miles an hour made less noise than
     the murmuring tires or the radio pouring clear jazz. The car was his own, not his
     father’s. He drove it as though he owned it, too; negligently, with one arm resting
     on the window ledge. George always sat up straight, driving like a motorman.
    “How do you feel this morning?” Sandy said.
    Marjorie, tying a pink kerchief over her tossing hair, said, “Just wonderful. How
     about you?” She wore a pink cotton frock and tiny gold sandals, with a bathing suit
     underneath. They were going to swim in a deserted cove some ten miles down the highway
     from the Prado.
    “I’m puzzled,” Sandy said. “I can’t make you out.”
    She stared at the long-jawed profile partly masked by sunglasses. His mouth was straight
     and serious. “You can’t make
me
out? Seems to me I’ve made myself a little too plain for comfort.”
    “Yes? What was all that, last night?”
    “I’m sure I don’t know. The moonlight, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that I like you a
     bit more than I should,” she said rather sharply.
    Grinning, he dropped a strong hand on her knee and gave it a brief squeeze. “That
     would be nice to believe.” She wanted to object to the squeeze, but the hand was gone.
     She curled in the far corner of the front seat, out of easy reach of him.
    If he was puzzled, so was she; extremely puzzled. She had been puzzling, since she
     woke, over what had happened the night before. Fixed ideas of hers had been shattered.
     She had thought an instinct of feminine honor prevented a girl from necking with one
     man when she loved another. George Drobes, even if he no longer filled the world from
     pole to pole, was still her accepted lover. Evidently no such instinct existed. She
     had also believed that a surrender to necking marked a dramatic turn in one’s emotions.
     But this morning her attitude toward Sandy remained the same: undefined, but friendly
     and curious rather than passionate. He seemed more familiar, that was all. It was
     her own self that was less familiar. Marjorie had surprised herself, and she was waiting
     with oddly pleasant nervousness to see what strange thing she would do next.
    They turned off the highway and went bumping down a lonely dirt road through thick
     pines. Marjorie’s nervousness increased. She was an addict of lending-library novels.
     Girls were always getting seduced in these books when they went off to a lonely place
     with a young man to swim; it was almost standard procedure. Sandy Goldstone, big,
     brown, and powerful, driving in silence with a shadow