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 even if he is. It’s not like losing him altogether, you know. If you send his body back, maybe his folks won’t even claim your boat or anything.

Eva—Shut up, you children.

Fairchild—But I tell you I saw—

Forward, Jenny, the niece, her brother come temporarily out of his scientific shell, and Pete stood in a group; Pete in his straw hat and the nephew with his lean young body and the two girls in their little scanty dresses and awkward with a sort of terrible grace. So flagrantly young they were that it served as a barrier between them and the others, causing even Mr. Talliaferro to lurk nearby without the courage to join them.

“These young girls,” Fairchild said. He watched the group, watched the niece and, Jenny as they clung to the rail and swung aimlessly back and forth, pivoting on their heels, in a sheer wantonness of young muscles. “They scare me,” he admitted. “Not as a possible or probable chastity, you know. Chastity aint”

“A bodiless illusion multiplied by lack of opportunity,” Mark Frost said.

“What?” he asked, looking at the poet. “Well, maybe so.” He resumed his own tenuous thought. “Maybe we all have different ideas of sex, like all races do Maybe us three sitting here are racially unrelated to each other, as regards sex. Like a Frenchman and an Anglo-Saxon and a Mongol, for instance.”

“Sex,” said the Semitic man, “to an Italian is something like a firecracker at a children’s party; to a Frenchman, a business the relaxation from which is making money; to an English-