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Looking at her through the steam, watching her innocent gentle expression was like being transposed back to the day that followed. She wore a giant T-shirt that day, with "University of California" printed on it in bold letters. Someone had given it to her, she said. It was too huge as a shirt and a wee bit too short to be worn as a dress. But that's how she wore it. Also, as far as I could make out, this was all that she wore.
Oh my God! For ten years I had hoped to meet her in a situation like this. Her legs were excitingly bare, smooth, and her breasts hardly hidden by the deep cut in the partially unbuttoned shirt.
My God! My God! I said to myself over and over. The constitution gives us total freedom; indeed, she had just pointed this out. We required no one's approval.... I had looked at her, silently, and received in reply one of the most wonderfully wicked grins that did total justice to the situation.
"Except there is a catch," she added. She said that the constitution, although it provides total freedom, is by its nature a limit to the totality of the freedom it provides.
She spoke without a smile.
"What limits?" I said.
"It requires one to pull back to a certain extend."
"Pull back from the very freedom it offers?"
She nodded, and began to smile again. "Freedom demands responsibility," she said. Her words seemed totally at odds with her appearance. "The way the constitution is written," she said, "seems to indicate that the substance of freedom is founded on responsibility and becomes a function of it. The one can't exist without the other. Technology can open the door to freedom, but can it give you what you are unable to grasp? We must be responsible for the risks we take!"
I could agree with that. Freedom without limits can become a slave-master. I knew that.
She had looked at me with her big brown eyes, waiting for a reply. Only I was too perplexed to say anything.
"We are both sexual human beings," she continued in time. "We live with our sexuality twenty-four hours a day. Out of it arise obvious sexual needs. Is it wise to deny that these needs exist?" She paused momentarily. "Is it wise to ignore these needs?" she continued. "Is it wise to pretend that Mother Nature has exceeded its greatest marvel in creating mankind, but has goofed on one fundamental point that must be ignored at all cost?"
"This would be absurd!" I said.
"The constitution doesn't deal in absurdities," she said quietly. "I see it as a chart for developing a mental technology. It encourages an intelligent daring to open the door to the world as far as one is able to bear, being constantly sensitive to the point of becoming overwhelmed by the process."
I agreed, more mechanically perhaps, than with reasoned conviction.
"Would you say we are intelligent enough to take up the challenge and not hurt anyone, especially those we have left behind?" she asked.
"Whatever blesses one must benefit all concerned. If it doesn't I won't have any part of it," I replied.
With these words from me still on my lips she started to completely unbutton her shirt.
I helped her remove it.
All that I could think of at this moment, the very realization of many dreams, hinged now on this measure of intelligence that would hold us back from overstepping the fine line beyond which our actions would no longer add anything of value to our being, but take away everything.
"Wow!" was really all that I could utter upon seeing her standing stark naked in front of me, a feeling that almost overwhelmed the carefully determined points of reference that had enabled this moment to be.
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