Chapter Three
Like most children who grow up in comfortable circumstances, Kim had been naive and immature. Though her parents had always tried to teach her high moral values, they had been indulgent and permissive as well. She had attended church every Sunday, and a parochial school during the week. She was an obedient child, not because she feared authority, but because she believed it was proper to honor the wishes of her elders. In school she avoided the corporal punishment common there, and ignored the internal imps that urged her to misbehave, just once, to find out what punishment was like.
There had been boys, though she had never loved any. During her seventeenth summer she had surrendered her virginity to a boy whose name she had since forgotten.
It was during her eighteenth s
