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sixteen and that girl in my gym class asked me home to spend the night, and I found out there was something better than smooching with boys in parked cars. Allene, or Eileen or something like that.
    I'm like anybody else, medium intelligent, a good editor, I like to cook, I look like a lot of other people—hell, I'm exactly like a thousand other girls, except I like making love to women instead of men. So what? It's my own private business.
    She unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it into the hamper. I don't seduce teen-agers, she continued her mental inventory, I don't pick people up, I'm not promiscuous. I tell the truth and pay my bills promptly. I do an honest day's work in return for my pay. They ought to have a better name for people like me.
    Nylons and panty girdle followed the blouse into the hamper. She stood in front of the long bathroom mirror, naked, and gave her reflection one of those searching inspections. It was a good enough body, slender and solid, slim of hip, with small but adequate breasts and a nice line from waist to knee. The body of an adolescent girl, at twenty-eight, yet soundly female.
    The girl in the tan bermudas had been built like a boy, with wide shoulders and muscular legs. Not Jo. She and Karen, on one of their few evenings out, could have been meeting to nice young men for a double date.
    She could see why the boys she knew, especially, had settled on "gay" as the least offensive word. It had a good go-to-hell sound. But there were all these times between lovers—they were about as un-gay as anything could possibly be. And even when you were most in love there was the knowledge that the rending lay ahead, hope as you might.
    Monogamy? She knew one couple who had been together six years, stable hard-working girls with half a dozen interests in common. Dina and Olive were buying a house in the suburbs. They were the only ones.
    Straight husbands and wives changed, grew apart, saw the dulling of the rainbow. But at least they started out with the intention of permanence.
    It was too complicated. She gave up trying. Abruptly she was no longer interested in evaluating herself or in finding a word for her own dilemma. She was achingly tired. She switched off the bathroom light, picked her way across the bedroom like a sleep-walker wading in dreams, and fell into bed. In less than five minutes she was asleep. Thinking as she went under, darling Rich; and then, that wonderful gin.
    She woke before full daylight, and lay comfortably with her hands under her head. It was as though, having pushed the affair into the past, she could see Karen in her true perspective. Or as though Karen had died and could be remembered without grief, with a gentle accept-ant sorrow.
    She had met Karen in a bar. It seemed odd now, partly because neither of them was much of a drinker, partly because it was an ordinary downtown bar catering mostly to squares—the sort of place where a secretary might go hoping to meet a man, or simply for a half-hour's relaxation on the way home from work. No such place as Richard had taken her to last night, where you might hope to meet somebody. That she had been in this bar was strange enough; that Karen would perch on the stool next to hers and there dissolve into gentle weeping was even more to be wondered at.
    What impulse had swerved her, Jo, aside from her bus trip homeward into this chrome and neon paradise for five-o'clock drinkers? She couldn't remember. Nor why she had taken a handful of crumpled tissues from her jacket pocket and offered them to the blonde girl who sat beside her, ignoring her drink and the tears that rained down her cheek. Jo's first year in the city had taught her to mind her own business. If someone dropped dead in the street, you called a cop. If a scream rang out in the middle of the night, you closed your window and went back to sleep. People in the city not only wanted but demanded anonymity—that was one reason she'd left Cottonwood Falls, the job in