Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SAVIOUR ance, to know how to deal with a girl who earned her own keep and was older than you were. Margaret laughed. “It doesn’t matter, silly,’ she said. “I'd just as soon stay here and talk. We can take our coffees over to one of the tables out of the way of every- one. I’ve just been helping out behind here till you arrived.” He felt his heart leap, because he knew that it wasn’t just a line. She really would just as soon sit and talk to him as go out somewhere. He didn’t know how he knew this, but know it he did. Within minutes, then, she had taken off her uniform smock and was sitting oppo- site him at one of the tables at the far end of the canteen, and there were two cups of steaming coffee between them, and life was a very wonderful thing indeed for Patrick Vane. They talked, the two of them, throughout the hours of the long afternoon. They talked and they drank coffee, and they looked into each other’s eyes, and to them, because they were alone and together, the hours were like minutes and the minutes had become, by some insidious, magical means, no longer than seconds. They spoke of them- selves and their pasts, and their probable futures. They spoke of friendship and love, and sex and society, and of all manner of things, bothabstract and concrete, and they were able to speak honestly to each other because they knew, both of them, that what they said would not be miscon- strued, nor derided, nor sneer- ingly repeated to others afier- - wards. It was a conversation such as really comes to pass between a young girl and a younger youth, because there was a total absence of con- flict and of tension. It was as though their words were weav- ing a tight web about them both and drawing them ever closer with each sentence spoken, with each thought transmitted and received. They told of their lives and their thoughts, and their de- sires. They spoke of things that they had done and thought and said, and—most of all—desired; things that they had never thought to tell another living soul. And each found that the other under- stood and did not condemn. Sometimes this was because the other had had similar thoughts or had done similar things, and sometimes it was because the other could see, in comiclbooks.cormn