Young Nora was so attractive to men that other women were willing to stab themselves repeatedly just to get a small fraction of the attention that Nora ignored. To Nora men were ***-mad perverts. She never initiated contact. To her: love was a many- splendored-what's-her-name. She had been briefly infatuated with the dog-catcher till she discovered that he was an s.-m. p. {***-mad pervert}. So for 2 years, as beauty betrayed her, Nora hagged copiously & shamefully. She grew gnarled and ugly. No man would have her for in the short expanse of 2 years she aged 30, mainly because of defective age-defying cold cream. Help was a fruit cake away. It may as well have been like that all along till Kevin, the land-locked town's only ocean-certified lifeguard, appeared.
  “Oh, Kevin,” Nora moaned, “can't it ever be like it used
to be when we were so mooch in love with each other?”