The same way a child mispronouncing a word can be cute, whereas a child mispronouncing a word to be cute annoys, a lisping woman can be very sexy, whereas a woman who lisps to be sexy repels, and I feared that my inadvertent certain something, like the child’s cuteness or the woman’s sexiness, might be one of those qualities self-consciousness could ruin, or (put another way) one of those behaviors, like the child’s mispronouncing or the woman’s lisping, that, in order to produce its desired effect, must not seem deliberate, i.e. had to seem, and perhaps had to be, inadvertent. In short, I
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