He gives a brief but detailed history of her life, describing her as a gallant and pretty little woman, then explains that he mentions her in this article on obscenity because she was his friend, and told him that, though the dirty words he used in his books did not astonish her, the words should not be published. Riah claimed that her circle of friends all agreed with her, imagining that he used the words to cause a sensation, in order to make his books more popular. “Her friends could not bear to read me anymore,” he states. 
	He gives another example, quoting a a newspaper article likening his use of four-letter words and line drawings to “a small boy sticking out his tongue at the teacher.” “This small boy sticking out his tongue was fifty years old at the time,” he says, appealing to Ethos by giving himself credibility. In fact, Vonnegut began to use these things more often as he matured as a writer, and their purpose, he explains, is not to shock anyone, but to make the people in his books talk the way really people talk. He wants to make jokes about our bodies, because he doesn't see any harm in it. Here he summarizes the opinions opposed to his own, that of those against bad manners and obscene language, then explains himself and his position. His counter-argument -- “Why not?” -- simply but effectively sums up his opinion that there is no harm is obscenity. 
	He goes back to Riah Fagan Cox and her friends. All of them, he has been assured, would not have been wobbled or astonished, because they had heard all the words he used many times before. “They would have insisted that the words should not be published anyway. It was bad manners to use such words. Bad manners should be punished.” The lack of logic here is self-evident. He doesn't need to point it out to further his logical argument. He then states his thesis, which I quoted earlier, but which begins “But even when I was in grammar school...” thereby furthering his Ethos, because he has held this point of view for such a long time. In the next paragraph, he says that he had this hunch confirmed when he was in the fourth grade or so.
	Vonnegut next tells a personal story from his childhood. The story takes place during the Great Depression. He was the son of wealthy parents and had been sent to private school before the Depression, but had been moved to elementary school, therefore associating more with the middle and lower class children he went to school with than with his upper-class parents. “Peer pressure, which is the most powerful force in the universe, had actually made me a scorner of my parents' class,” he explains. 