Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 65 — page 54: what you’re looking at

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

THE PHOENIX TREATMENT A chance encounter had triggered Joseph’s personal cataclysm—the evanescent soft warmth of a ravishing young Indian woman’s hand brushing his own as they were jostled together in a hotel vestibule. A glance into spark- ling brown eyes; an impression of humour suffusing a visage of dusky loveliness. Joseph’s heart had gone winging into the empyrian, love-seeking, never again to make obeisance at the altar of Mammon. Sita, who was returning with her merchant-prince father from a European. business trip, had reciprocated his tender emotion. The court- ship was a spiritual whirlwind, a physical riot of lavish expenditure—marred only by thesardonicsmile permanently fixed on the wizened face of Sita’s parent. In less than a month, the wooing had cul- minated in a wedding; and, after a fortnight’s honeymoon in the Mediterranean, Joseph had taken home a beautiful, loving and obedient wife. Obedient ..! The word lodged in his gullet like a . festering fish bone. Conjugal familiarity had not dulled his appreciation of Sita’s fine qualities; rather, from day to day, he become more enslaved 53 by her charms, and her loving- ness and obedience kept pace. Her obedience, finally, almost drove him mad. Nourishing a grand passion, he desired a complementary emotion, matching or out- stripping his own. Obedience was the mark of the slave, not the lover, and Sita’s submission to his slightest whim humiliated him. No one was to blame. When youth calls to youth, passion’s excruciating sweetness bursts into spontaneous flowering; and prim-petalled Obedience was alien to such riotous - efflorescence. As the poet had succinctly phrased it: *““Crabbed age and youth can- not live together;” and Joseph had found this out the hard way, discovering that love turned to rape, desire to lewdness, and that one’s self- respect was destroyed. And soon he realised that, unless he found some means to remedy the situation, his mar- riage would founder irrevoc- ably. The outcome was his taking the three-months’ rejuvenation course at Professor Grund- hoff’s sanatorium. Sita be- lieved he was on a world-wide business trip, and he had arranged for her to receive comiclooks.com