Molly's mature sexual life had started at the age of thirteen! She had had an affair with a high school senior in her home town—she described it as a "back-seat" affair—and it had lasted for a year. From the beginning and even under the unfavorable circumstances that love-making in an automobile must certainly create, Molly had had a total sexual response.
Since that time she had had upward of forty sexual affairs. None of them had lasted for more than a year and some only one or two weeks. All of them had been with men who were ineligible for marriage either because they were already married or because they were not emotionally capable of marrying.
Molly, though she had certain superficial pretensions to being an intellectual, was not one by any means. But she was an intelligent girl. She had a position as a researcher on a weekly trade paper, and her work had put her in line to become head of the research department. Her job represented the "respectable" side of her life. However, despite some uneasiness of brief duration in college, she had never seriously questioned the "rightness" of her sexual conduct. Each time she had had an affair she believed that she was in love and she never had more than one affair at a time. When the current love was over she always experienced feelings of relief.
If Molly had come from an environment where a free attitude toward sexuality had prevailed, her actions might not have seemed so inexplicable. But her home environment could not have been more conventional. She had come from a small New England city near Boston. Her father was the president of the leading bank in that city and had been active in church and civic affairs. Her mother, too, had been a church leader and a member of the school board. Her parents' marriage had obviously been a good one; the domestic
