She was quite sure that she loved him more than he loved her, but he was a man, after all, and men had other things to worry about.

He was younger than she and had long hair that fell into his eyes when he shook his head, and he mumbled when he spoke. If you asked him a question he would wriggle and scratch himself and look at the floor as if he were feeling out the line, and finally he would grunt some extraordinarily emotional result like: "Yeah, let's go to the movies."

Love, Barbara thought, is a four-letter word, but most of the boys I meet seem to have it confused with another four-letter word that people don't mention in polite company.

She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one's thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.