MY SECRET LIFE
as randiness. I suddenly seemed a man to her. My spending in her hand upset her still more. I asked if that had made her let me have her. She replied, “I gave up the self denial of years, abandoned my intentions, and let you do it; when you pushed me into the garden parlour I intended to let you as I went in, I had not quite intended before.”
There was the greatest difficulty after that day in getting her, for my mother seemed always in my way, and objected to my being in the kitchen. Mary never helped me as Charlotte used, as cook indeed she could not. She ran no risks, and was never in a hurry, so where I had Charlotte half a dozen times, I could scarcely get Mary once.
She met me out again, and in a fortnight asked for another holiday. It astonished my mother, for more than a year she scarcely had gone out, and never had taken a whole holiday. What another day of ballocking it was, in that old, snug, baudy house—but we had a quarrel there.
Even with my inexperience, I knew she was different from Charlotte at the first poke. I used in my mind to compare the differences. Charlotte’s curiosity, the manifest novelty of fucking to her, even for a couple of months after her splitting and bleeding; was so different from the steady, quiet, well satisfied way with which Mary copulated. Pondering over this, I wondered if she had been done before, how often, and by how many, or had I been the first? The idea of asking her was always floating through my brain. That day I said to her as her face was towards mine on the pillow, and I was toying with her bubbies, “I wonder who had you before me.” She sat up, looked me stead-
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