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FLAMING

YOUTH

education through the media of flash fiction and the conventional false moralizings of the screen. In a variety of presentations they all taught the same lesson, that when girls “went wrong” they invariably “got into trouble.” She passed her hands down along her slender, boyish body and experienced a sharp qualm of fear and disgust and anger, a Visualisation of gross and sodden changes in those slim contours. It couldn’t happen to her. In spite of the movies, other girls “took a chance” and “got away with it.” Ada Clare, for instance, according to common gossip; nothing had happened to her. Cissie Parmenter

had

lightly

hinted

at “experiences.”

Pat

thought it would be exciting to tell Cissie. But would it be safe? She would like to have Cissie’s reassurance that everything would be all right. But why should she need reassurance? She steadied herself with the thought, entertained wholly without idea of blasphemy or irreverence, that God wouldn't let anything like that come about, the God to whom she had paid such assiduous homage by going regularly to church and asking every night for what she specially wanted on the morrow or in the further future. It was her naive idea of an unwritten pact with the Deity that the performance of her little ritual, be it never

so self-seeking,

entitled her, of right, to definite

rewards and exemptions, claimable as required. This was one of them. Surely He would keep to His part of

the bargain.

Otherwise, what good would religion be to

anyone? . It occurred to her uncomfortably that He had somewhere said, ““The wages of sin is death,” which she secretly

deemed bad grammar even if it was in the Bible.

But Pat

did not really feel that this was sin; rather it was accident.

Technically it might be sin; she admitted so much. But if it were really sin she would, as a sound Christian, feei