and for quick tissue examinations during the morning
operations. By ten, the biopsies were usually out of the way, and he
spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon checking material from
the bacteriology section and studying post-operative dissections of
tumorous tissues and organs removed in surgery.

It was engrossing, important work, and it could be accomplished in a
normal work-day, leaving the pathologist considerable leisure to study,
read and relax. Shortly after the pantie-raid conversation with Phyllis
Sutton, he found the evening paper attracting more than his usual quick
perusal.

This emotional fuss in the young human animal was beginning to preoccupy
the newspaper world. Writers were raising their eyebrows and a new crop
of metaphors at the statistics, which they described variously as
alarming, encouraging, disheartening, provocative, distressing, romantic
or revolting, depending upon the mood and point of view.

As June, the traditional mating month, wore into July, national
statistics were assembled to reveal that marriages were occurring at
almost double the highest previous rate, that the trend was accelerating
rather than diminishing.

Jewelers and wholesale diamond merchants chalked up fabulous increases
in the sale of engagement and wedding settings. Clergymen and qualified
public officials were swamped with requests for religious and civil
marriage ceremonies.

Parks, beaches and drive-in theaters were jammed with mooning and/or
honeymooning couples, and amusement parks began expanding their
over-patronized tunnel-of-love facilities.

The boom in houses, furniture, appliances and TV was on, and last year's
glut of consumer goods for the home was rapidly turning into a shortage.

All was not good news, however. The divorce courts reported their
calendars stacked months ahead of time, and an increasing number of
lurid headlines were devoted to the love-triangular troubles of the
rich, famous and notorious. Love-nest exposes and bigamous marriages
rocketed in number.

The whole world, adolescent and adult, was falling in love, with the
inevitable unrequited infatuations, the jealousies, infidelities and the
bitter-sweetness of wholesale, illicit, impossible love situations in
which vulnerable people found themselves increasing astronomically.

Writers of popular newspaper psychology columns attributed the rampaging
emotional fire to everything from mass-hysteria, caused by sunspots,