| OCR Text |
Show 11 Relieved, I drove the girls in our family Model T to the little bathhouse atop the ridge. The girls changed in privacy, I outside. When they emerged I followed them to the pool as humbly as a street puppy wistful for a master or mistress. They shone in the moonlight, lovely and remote from a 14-year-old lad, far, too far from me for anything but anguish of immaturity, with a pinch of the ridiculous thrown in. What puzzled me afterward, remembering that brief plunge in the moonlit pool on the white mound, was this: how talkative and sweet the girls were to each other although there had been coldness between them at that recent Thermo dance. They all but ignored me. They were anything but skillful swimmers, yet they seemed not to observe how I swam on my back without using my arms, how I huffed and puffed past them in a floundering butterfly, how I showed them my polished sidestroke. How are the mighty fallen. How a potential man of the world and generally daring character shrank back into childhood's cocoon again. Recently, the Utah geological survey suggested our Hot Springs as a possible source of electric power. California already uses such a source. Italy has gone farther. That made me remember "The Dynamo and the Virgin." Henry Adams had perhaps shown me how to draw meaning from a painful memory of youth. |
