THE HARD-BOILED VIRGIN
virtue is likely to relent, and that unless she relents she finds herself unable to compete with the repentant sinner’s self-abasement. She had already discovered the awkwardness of quarrels between partners of a bed, but if she had known that she was beginning to walk in the holy footprints of Saint Katharine of Alexandria, she could not have wept longer when she discovered that the horrifying felicities of the holy bonds of matrimony sometimes follow the horrors of connubial fury, and when she discovered that a father and a mother are a man and a woman—that they are not only one flesh, but two.
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