life was serene; they rarely quarreled; their civic duties were most often shared enterprises. And they genuinely loved their three children. There were two girls older than Molly, and they had led most conventional lives. They had married after college and each had had two children.
What, then, had caused Molly's rebellion against her environment? And what was at the root of her inability to form a relationship? What was the cause of her psychic frigidity?
A psychiatrist familiar with this kind of case considers the possibility of an early seduction of some kind. It had indeed occurred.
Molly was unwilling to discuss it at first. And this was followed by an unwillingness to ascribe any particular significance to the event. She believed it was an isolated occurrence that had had no particular or permanent effect on her. Actually, as the matter unfolded, it became clear that this event was the very nucleus of her later difficulties.
It had happened when she was six. Three houses down from her there had lived a man in his early sixties. I shall call him Mr. Brown. He was a well-to-do person whose wife had died some years before and who now lived alone. He was very friendly, she remembered, with everyone, and often her father, out for an evening stroll, would drop in on him and spend an hour or two chatting on Mr. Brown's screened-in veranda. Occasionally he would come to Molly's house for dinner. She found out later that he was a director in her father's bank. He was certainly, as far as her parents or any other grownups were concerned, above all suspicion.
Sometimes Molly would play jump-rope or hopscotch outside of Mr. Brown's house. One day he invited her in and gave her a piece of cake and ten cents. She was delighted, and often thereafter he would have her in, always giving her something sweet to eat. He was pleasant and gentle and she loved him. She did not remember the first time it happened,
