From time to time, Uncle Pete would send a package of books and magazines from wherever he happened to be. Each was devoured totally by the isolated girl with the hunger to see and know about life. But even those were censored by her mother who checked them first to see which of them were suitable for a decent Christian girl to look at.

She added to her reading supply on those infrequent times when her mother sent her into town on an errand. It meant walking a mile to the county road and waiting for a bus which made four trips a day. From there, a bumpy, forty-minute ride took her to the little town. It was a little town, but after the total isolation of the bush country, it was more than that, it was a big city with well-dressed, laughing people, stores, traffic and so many other things to see and hear. Each time she made the trip, she would carefully collect the papers and magazines she found on the bus, on the streets and, if she could be sure she wasn't being watched, in the litter cans.

Always, there was the vague hope that someday she would be able to go out into the world like other people, and tat the more she learned about it in advance, the easier it would be to cope with. But the papers and magazines didn't tell her anything about sex, about the functions of her body that she didn't understand. She had peen young couples kissing and holding each other on the bus. It always looked exciting and never failed to send strange feelings shooting through her body, but she didn't really know what they meant or what to do about them.

Once, when she had been about thirteen, she discovered a strange sensation of pleasure when she stroked her cunt after having a bath. Her mother caught her at it, and the doubled leather belt, which lashed her ass and legs, taught her that the pleasure, confusing as it was, wasn't enough to compensate for the pain of a strapping, so she stopped. She never learned about finger-fucking.