Excerpt from Campus Tramp by Andrew Shaw (a pseudonym of famed mystery writer Lawrence Block), a 1959 softcore porn novel newly reissued as a trade paperback (Creeping Hemlock Press, 2010):
She kept working, knowing that she would have to withdraw at the end of the term anyway, knowing that the work she was doing wouldn’t keep her in school and wouldn’t really do much of anything for her. But she had to prove to herself that she could do it, had to keep her head above water and wind up with her courses passed. Proving her point to Dean Maples was secondary; proving it to herself meant a lot more to her for the time being.
Besides, as it turned out it was easier to keep going than to stop. It was like the line in Macbeth about being so far steeped in blood that to go on is easier than to return. She was in the study habit now for better or for worse. It was normal to go to classes, normal to read and write, normal to spend all her waking hours at her desk. Learning was becoming an end in itself, strangely enough, and she was actually beginning to enjoy the whole thing.
It was ironic, she thought. Now that there was no more opportunity for her to go on with her work, now she was getting a kick out of it. If only she had approached the whole problem that way from the beginning! She was just starting to realize how different the wholething might have been. If she had worked on her schoolwork while she was with Don, if a secondary interest in the academic part of school had kept her busy when she wasn’t with him, then she might have had a chance to keep him. If she hadn’t been so damned possessive because he was all she had, then he might not have been quite so anxious to get her off his neck. Well, whatever had happened had happened. There was no sense crying over spilled milk…or over a fractured maidenhead, for that matter.
Read and study and sleep.
Sleep and study and eat.
Eat and read and sleep.
That was about all she did, right up to the week of exams, right up to the last and hardest week of the term.
Just read and study and eat.
And sleep with Joe Gunsway.