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 Now I am “fucking” my “honeybox” with both hands. That little stick of flesh there; what is that called? It feels so good when I stroke it and jerk it! And when I push my fingers—two of them at once -- all the way up my “honeybox”. I wonder what a man’s ‘thing’ looks like, (Glory had heard a maid call it that.) Ooh! it’s so exciting when I think of that! Of his ‘thing’ up my “honeybox”and “fucking” like my three fingers. (Is three too much?) Faster now and faster and faster! Sucking my bosom tip! Thinking of. . .and now. . . and now. . ..

 “Just what do you think you’re doing!”

 Her mother stood in the doorway to the bedroom, her face a mask of outrage and disgust. She crossed the room and slapped the girl’s hands away from her body, shuddering at the moistness she encountered. She walked back to the door, shut it firmly, and turned to Glory.

 What followed was a lecture on the subject of what could happen to nasty little girls who played with themselves. To hear Florence Dawes tell it, raving insanity was the least of the possible results. Again she finished with the bit about sex being a trap of which a girl must beware.

 But that wasn’t really the end of the matter. Deep inside herself, Florence Dawes hadn’t been so much shocked by what her daughter had been doing as by the sight of Glory’s naked body. She hadn’t realized how much her daughter had developed. She’d grown into a woman -- and a damn ravishing one at that. With that bosom filling out and that angel-face and golden hair, she’d be a real man-killer. The thought gave Florence pause.

 Competition in these parts was tough enough, what with all the young movie starlets flocking to the Riviera, without having to beware of one’s own daughter. Besides, Glory looked older than her years and Florence didn’t want any of her suitors getting the wrong idea about how old she was. Also, some of them might try their wiles on Glory, and Florence certainly didn’t intend to be put in the position of chaperoning Glory’s virtue. All these factors combined to make Florence wire Preston B. Dawes that Glory would be returning to New York earlier than had been previously arranged.

 Although she’d been shuttling back and forth between her parents for years, Glory was saddened at the idea of leaving her mother. She liked her father, perhaps even loved him, but there was a coldness to his personality that seemed always to keep her at a distance from him. With her mother, it was different. True, she paid very little attention to Glory, but she was a woman who seemed always to move in an aura of glowing warmth. Glory idolized her, tried to copy her, was far more attracted to her ultra-femininity than to her father’s masculine qualities. Florence Dawes would always remain the ideal to Glory, would always represent that which was most worth loving. In the end, this would play its part in Glory’s fate.

 Many elements combined to mold this fate during the seven years which followed. Chief among them was Glory’s deepening disappointment in not seeing her mother again. Once each year Glory would allow herself to hope that her mother would arrange for them to be together. Once each year there would come a letter or a telegram from her mother explaining why it was impossible and promising they’d see each other next year surely.

 The excuses were varied. Travel plans wouldn’t allow. . . . Convalescence from a minor illness made it impossible. . . . Social obligations forbid. . . . A shortage of accommodations presented insurmountable difficulties. . . . These and other excuses left their mark on the years during which Glory was growing up.

 The truth was that as Glory grew older, Florence became more and more disinclined to risk the complications of having an attractive and maturing female around. But Glory didn’t know this. She accepted the excuses. She even invented reasons of her own to explain away her mother’s neglect.

 Glory contented herself with following her mother’s life through the Sunday rotogravure sections and gossip columns. She hung on her mother’s romances with a Greek shipping tycoon, an American movie star, a titled English diplomat, and others. She traveled vicariously with her mother from the Riviera to Switzerland and Paris and Scotland even once to Palm Beach. She faithfully kept a scrapbook into which was put every item and news photo of her mother which appeared.

 The years passed quickly. The greater part of them Glory spent in an exclusive, girls’ boarding school. Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations she lived with her father, but the rest of the time she was kept in this rather cloistered, all-girl environment.

 The times with her father were pleasant, but not particularly close. He seemed always preoccupied with business and while his feelings for his daughter went deeper than a mere concern for her physical welfare, he wasn’t constituted to express such feelings easily. By the time Glory graduated from school at the age of eighteen and went to live with her father in NewYork, the boundaries of their relationship had been set. She soon discovered that any attempt to extend them only embarrassed Preston B. Dawes.

 She stopped trying around the time she met Don Corrigan. Don was a junior executive of Universal Enterprises, the mammoth, interlocking corporation in which Glory’s father held one of the top managerial positions and the title of Special Consultant. Don was one of her father’s aides, and Preston B. Dawes thought very highly of him.

 So, too, did most people who knew Don Corrigan. Personable, good-looking and intelligent, he was living proof that the Horatio Alger myth still has validity in American life. At twenty-five, Don had overcome his poor New York slum background to become recognized as one of the most promising young men employed by Universal Enterprises.

 The cost of his success -- which Don had never begrudged had been mostly in terms of time. He was seventeen when he went to work for Universal as a messenger boy in the publicity department. By the time he was nineteen he had managed to save enough money to enroll in a night-college. When he graduated with a degree in business management, he’d already received three promotions at Universal and his salary was nearly triple what it had originally been.

 Don had sacrificed youth to ambition. He had foregone all social life to establish his career. And during these years neither sex nor girls had any place in his scheme of things. These attitudes were just beginning to relax; he was just starting to allow himself to indulge a bit, to allow a non-business side to his life and to enjoy it, when he met Glory.

 It was at a small dinner party which Preston B. Dawes gave for his business associates and their wives. Don was the only unmarried guest present, which balanced off nicely with Glory acting as hostess for her father. He was still a little unused to the tuxedo he was wearing, slightly awed by the lavish Park Avenue duplex which was the Dawes home. But his forthrightness and boyish charm more than made up for any gauche qualities he had.

 “My father is very impressed with you,” Glory said, putting him at his ease.

 “I take that as a real compliment. I’m tremendously impressed with your father. He has a mind like a steel trap. The amount of detail he carries around with him and manages to keep straight never ceases to amaze me.”

 They were seated together on a couch in the drawing room, sipping at their after-dinner liqueurs. Don had been trapped between two wifely Westchester types during dinner and very much appreciated being freed of their country-club chitchat-which, for the most part, had been meaningless to him. Besides, Glory Dawes with her chic yet voluptuous blonde beauty was the most attractive girl he’d met in a long time. Now he found himself discussing his work with her and was soon going into details he usually only discussed with the other men at Universal.