Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 102: what you’re looking at

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

98 | <M PRET E - be damned little youd be thinking of cots if that happened. You’d be too busy having babies.” She said, coldly: “TI think that’s rather benolet He said, hotly: “Is that so? What’s beastly about babies? You'd be getting a slant on the present day with some outlook on the future—instead of burying your red head in the past. What I’m afraid of is that you'll marry some dusty-dry, mummy-minded, scientific grave robber and spend the rest of your life nursing fossils instead of what you are obviously designed for—” She interrupted, furiously, eyes snapping blue sparks: “Tl let nobody pick my husband! Least of all—you!” “Won't you!” Barry’s too-quick anger flared. “It seems to me you were ready enough to pick wives for me just now. Not one, but a dozen—” He gripped her arms and swung her to him. “You—the highbrow scientist? Like hell you are! Look at that mop of red hair. Those eyes of yours with the devil’s twist to the ends of them, that mouth of yours—and I’ve seen you in your rag of a bathing suit! I tell you again, by God, that once you're awake it’s not fossils you'll’ be thinking of! And maybe this will help wake you—"” | He held her close, kissed eyes and throat, pressed his lips to hers. She lay in his arms, passive, unresisting. She said at last, indifferently: “Cave-man stuff, Barry. Too crude. It doesn’t interest me at all.” He released her, stepping back as though out of a dash of: cold water. She raised her arms and began to coil her disordered hair. She laughed at him, a little too sweetly—though he did not know it. : “You see, Barry dear, we're as far apart as the poles. You make love to me by enumerating my—ah, charms, is the cliche for it, I think. You are an— ah, anatomical lover. It is a viewpoint, certainly. A Sultan’s viewpoint, but I do not care for Sultans. Nor,” went on Joan, still far too sweetly and reason- ably, “do I think that my worthinesses are wholly anatomical. But then— you've always been rich—” ~ * %* * J EDITOR’S NOTE: At the above point, the manuscript comes to an abrupt® end. We corresponded with Mrs. Eleanor H. Merritt, the author's widow, in an effort to find out if there was any see to be shed on the remainder of the novel. Mrs. Merritt wrote: “Mr. Merritt's fans had been devilling him to write a sequel to The Snake Mother or The Face in the Abyss—so he started out with that thought in ConnicloOoks. conn