She was walking rapidly to Room 12, and the last class of the day; normally this would have produced happiness within her. In one hour she could say goodbye to her young pupils and head toward home, but the coming hour today was one she dreaded with all of her might, just as she had hated this class every week since the beginning of the school year last September. Once a week she had been experiencing the nightmarish horror of having to stand in front of the small group of youthful students and keeping a tight check on her quaking inner emotions, so that they would not be able to guess the torment which surged through her increasingly as the minutes ticked by. Her agony was of her own doing, she fully knew; a product of her past catching up with her, and of her present throwing temptation continually up into her face. Miss Joan Frazer was the teacher of Montock High's experimental sex education course. The once-a-week class on Wednesdays had probably been the hottest controversy to strike the farming community of Montock since the mayor had been in session since September, seven months ago, still the small town was split with the emotional fury of whether sex and procreation should be taught in the schools. For some years now, educators had been pressing for sex education in one form or another, ranging from a simple birds-and-bees outline to a comprehensive, multi-grade study of sexual techniques that included lessons in premarital intercourse, venereal diseases, masturbation, sodomy, and other forms of "unnatural", if commonly practiced acts.

The "Progressives", mostly in the state's few large cities, had argued that the family and church had failed in supplying a healthy, knowledgeable program to adolescents, and were cloaking their own fears and dogmas in embarrassed and harmful silence. The modern generation, these educators maintained, was smarter, sharper, and more solid than any other in the history of the world. The boys and girls growing up today wanted facts, not superstition, and as they matured into young men and woman, they had a right to know the truth about their budding sexuality.