Observing the End of Gentility

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, and hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc—instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.
“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.
“Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.
“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.



Note from Sutter’s casebook:
The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., we might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

from The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy