If she had smoked, she would have lit a cigarette. But her strict puritan father stayed her hand there, too. Illicit sex, cursing, cigarettes, coffee, liquor – they were all the work of the devil, he'd said it so often that Laura really felt she believed it. The fact that so many people succumbed to these vices only served to prove the hold that the Fallen One had on the people of the world.

"He walks among us," her father used to say, in any number of his many sermons, intoning sonorously through his bushy dark beard flecked with grey. "He walks among us and he takes our pulse, listens to our heartbeats. He is the Evil One who has fallen."

Laura had been as impressed as her eight brothers and sisters, she supposed, and in all of her twenty-one years she had never smoked a cigarette nor taken a drink of liquor. Her father's warnings had held up well.

And then she had met and married Ralph Saunders, a young man devoted to healing the sick and to making a lot of money, not necessarily in that same order.

Nonetheless Laura had married him, after a whirlwind courtship which had included more than a few attempts on his part to work his masculine will on virginal young flesh. Fortunately her earlier training had sustained her, and she had been able to fight him off just in time, before she became too winded to have any strength. She could remember very dearly the final night of their courtship, when Ralph had been especially demanding and determined to take advantage of her trusting innocence.

She blushed even now to think of it, and only wished that her thoughts wouldn't keep resuming somehow to such lascivious topics. But how could she forget that night – the night when a man had first managed to insinuate himself into the warmth of her sensuously aroused young pussy? Even though it had been only Ralph's finger which had entered her and nothing else.