advances. At thirteen she would sneak out at night to meet one of several older boys, and on one of these occasions she had sexual intercourse. She went around with this boy for about a year. He then graduated from high school and went away to college, and Molly promptly started another sexual relationship with another senior in high school.
Sexual affairs from then on followed one after the other through high school and college. The only concession Molly made to conventional morality was the afore-mentioned fact that she did not allow the affairs to overlap.
As she entered her teens another aspect of Molly's behavior became apparent. More and more she sought out individuals markedly different from those on her own social level. By fifteen she had become distinctly "wild," coming in late at night and refusing to obey her parents in any way. She would not go out with any of the high school or college boys she met. She had made friends with a group of girls on a lower economic level whose social life consisted largely of picking up men at dances. In this way Molly met several men who played in bands and who were, of course, not what her family could possibly have approved of. She did not care in the least; she felt she told me, "unutterably bored" with her family, felt "they were sunk in their way of life," led absolutely "joyless and pointless existences."
Despite all this, Molly maintained her scholastic record at a high level and was admitted to college—another sign of the division within her personality. In college her unremitting affairs persisted, as did her selection of friends outside of her own social sphere. At one point she had an affair with a Negro labor organizer, at another with an Italian dock hand, at still another with the father of a college classmate. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as she finished college (and here, too, she maintained her good scholastic record) she gravitated toward Greenwich Village
