The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

have to get out for fear I’ll tear it up. After a picnic,” he ended cheerfully, “I’ll go back thinking I’m the equal of Anatole France. And so continue the great work.”

The obscene pictures which Hugh referred to was called to the paper’s attention that morning by the post office department, the American censor of the arts, for whom a sample copy of the magazine had to be made up from page proofs before the edition was allowed to go to press. It was an ordinary picture of a nude woman, ordinary to the Flame, at least, which appreciated nudity, and the fact that the artist was an upright middle-aged American who was more appreciated abroad than he was in America, mattered little to the censor.

“We’ve got to do something about that picture,” observed the business manager now that his attention had been called to it. “What’ll it be? Have the printer block it out?”

“That’s entirely too simple to be clever,” Brace reproved. “I’ve got a much better idea. I thought of it after you had telephoned to me this morning.” He took out one of those fashion books which are stacked in the doors of department stores as he spoke. “I stopped in Wanamaker’s as I passed,” he explained. And he picked up a pair of scissors and turning to a page of fashionable dresses he began to cut one out very carefully.

“Lovely idea,” June observed. “It reminds me of the time that I cut out paper dolls. Mother used to bring us home some of those every time she went downtown.”

The other two watched him fascinated. Not having played with paper dolls in their youth they did not know what Hugh was about to do.

“There! It is just the right size, you see.” And he took the original drawing of the nude figure and pasted it from neck to shin. “I’m sure the artist won’t mind my defacing his original. Anything to put something over on the post office.⁠ ⁠… Now if you’ll just send this down to the engraver’s and have him make a plate of it and give him word to send it to the printer’s they can substitute this for the original.” Brace surveyed the ridiculous result of his work with a great deal of satisfaction.

All they had to do to prepare the picnic was to stop in a butcher and grocery shop and buy supplies. “We’ll put it down on general expenses,” the business manager observed as he paid for the purchases. “We’re short on household expenses.”

For the three men clubbed together as the advertising manager put it, in order that they might live in the style to which they were accustomed without exceeding their meager salaries.

That day was a long day of talk⁠—mostly about themselves.

Daniel Sloane, the advertising manager, was a tall, phlegmatic Hollander who had lived most of his youth in Texas. He was a graduate of Harvard and when he was consciously conversing, you could detect a trace of what is known as the “Harvard accent” in his enunciation. There was more than a hint of the Southwestern in his speech for he had worked in a small town in the west before he had earned enough money to go to Harvard, and you could tell that he spoke Dutch with his family by a slight foreign note in his voice.

At the time when June was in the university town Daniel had been driving an ambulance car in France. Six months of service at the front resulted in shell shock. At this time, the shattering of his nerves was still noticeable, but he was making continual efforts to get back. He had no sympathy with the Flame but being something of a Jesuit in his principles, he worked to live. Now that war was declared by America he never let up in his endeavor to enlist in any form of active service.

Before the war he had had the same dogged enthusiasm for writing plays with the same dogged determination to have them produced. Although he no longer wrote⁠—war did not admit of voluntarily pursuing one’s personal ambition⁠—he never lost faith in what he had written and the greatest mark of friendship that he could have possibly shown, he showed to June. He gave her two of his plays to read. They were good plays to read, she knew that, but she knew too little about the production of them to criticize from more than a literary standpoint. She criticized them diffidently, for although she could imagine writing a book or a short story, she could not imagine herself writing a play. And when someone else did what was impossible to her, she respected them accordingly.

Daniel had two complexes, as Hugh in his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis often pointed out to him. One was a persecution complex. That was in regard to his writing. The other was a chastity complex.

For Daniel, as Tolstoy put it, had “whored a great deal in his youth.” That was the general idea which he managed to convey to June in the course of their friendship. From the way in which he talked of that revered institution which he had attended, June drew the conclusion that looseness was no part of it. Texas was connected with Daniel’s early life, and the only deduction you could draw from Daniel’s talk was that Texas was as iniquitous a place as the legended California in the days of the gold strike.

Hugh was an ardent feminist. June was much more in sympathy with what he had to say than she was with the haphazard talk of the “little group” in the university in their discussions of free love and single standards. When he talked of the necessity of a love life for woman, irrespective of marriage, she found him much more intelligible than she had found women writers on the subject. There were long arguments as to why a young woman should not remain in a virginal state after she had