wouldn't mean anything and she was confident that a break-in date would start Ken off on the road to fame.
Again she failed to take into consideration the flaws in her own armor. Feinberg promised her the date all right, but not until she was closeted with him in the shoddy old hotel on Fourth Street did she realize that she had made an awful mistake. For months her desires had slumbered, sublimated in the passion for Ken. As she waited in the hotel room for Feinberg to undress, she was as nervous as a young virgin who sits listening for the footfall of her bridegroom.
Feinberg brought gin with him. She drank, in order to keep herself from walking out. The gin liberated all the raging secret lust which she had so successfully stifled. In a few minutes' time she was transformed into a glittering she-devil, a ravaging Venus, a despoiler of men. Feinberg was amused. He rewarded her with the three days at San Bernardino.
As she sat beside Ken in the Los Angeles bound bus, she felt the core of her going rotten. She trembled. She knew she wanted him now, now. Because they were in the motor bus, she successfully resisted the impulse. But, she must not trust herself alone with him, never again, until she was sure of him. She craftily tried to gauge the safest method of procedure. She must wait. She must not lose him. She must learn how to seduce him, this time not with maternal care, sisterly devotion nor the faith of a friend; this time not with gin and those devices which, from time immemorial, have been used by harlots everywhere. This time she must seduce him with patience, with slow, fiendishly deliberate guile. She must prepare herself for the ordeal of
