What did you spend so much time talking about with Ila? If you weren’t dancing with that long-legged fellow, you were talking to her like it was some kind of secret.”“Ila was giving me advice on being a woman,” Gene replied absently. He began laughing, and she gave him a hooded, dangerous look that he failed to see.“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”“That,” Gene said, “is probably why you make such a bad job of it.

The Eye of the World