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and married him in time. She could picture herself living a normal life without ever suspecting she was abnormal.
    But how unhappy she would have been!
    She never would have been able to enjoy sex with her husband. That was certain. Even if she could have managed to let him make love to her—a thought which in itself was so terrifying and so repugnant to her that it made her shake—she could never have derived any pleasure from the act. She would have completely missed the pleasure she received from Sharon, and that pleasure alone more than compensated for the occasional feelings of distress over her abnormality.
    Her thoughts returned to Ralph Lambert. Except for sex, he was the type of man she might have been able to stand being married to. She certainly didn’t dislike men, the way so many lesbians did. In fact she had always preferred the companionship of men to that of women, except that men frightened her so much.
    But she wasn’t afraid of Ralph. It had been a good idea to put it to him right from the beginning—no sex, now or later. And he didn’t seem to take offense, either. He evidently liked her for herself, as a person.
    But he appreciated her as a woman, too. She could tell that readily enough. While he never stared at her with naked hunger in his eyes, the admiration of her face and body was easy to recognize. And it was a good deal stronger than the admiration of an artist for a beautiful object. Ralph hadn’t looked at her with the eyes of a lecher, but he hadn’t gazed at her as he might have gazed at a beautiful landscape either.
    She hoped they would continue to get along. What would it be like posing for him? She could hardly imagine it. It would certainly be strange, holding a pose while a man tried to reproduce her on a canvas. And even if the man was a man she knew, even if he was Ralph, she wasn’t sure whether she would be able to pose nude for him.
    She thought back to their conversation and giggled. At any rate, it was nice to know that her head and body went well together!
    Ralph hauled one of the colonial chairs over to the front window and sat down in it. His eyes stared out the window toward Barrow Street but he wasn’t conscious of anything that he saw there.
    His mind was elsewhere.
    He wondered how much truth was contained in Stella’s last statement. You were a wreck before I ever laid eyes on you , she had said. At first it had sounded to him like a typical statement of hers, defending by attacking. She said things of that nature frequently, as if she could make herself less vile by dragging everybody down to her own level.
    But perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in what she had said. Maybe he was no good from the start. Maybe he had made a mess out of his own life, and had only himself to blame for his current state of affairs. Stella was obviously a corrupting influence—hell, a woman like her would exert a corrupting influence on Satan himself. But maybe he was already pretty corrupt when she came into his life.
    What had he been like before Stella James?
    It was hard to remember. It was hard to visualize any life for himself other than the one he lived now, hard to picture himself in any surroundings other than those of the Village, hard to imagine him living anyplace beside 69 Barrow Street or with anybody but Stella James.
    But there had been times before that. What sort of life had he led then?
    He forced himself to go over his life briefly. Childhood in Xenia, Ohio—that had been uneventful enough, with nothing and nobody in that little hickish town to excite or stimulate him. The local college where he majored in art. Then two years in the army, and all he could remember about those days was that he hated them—the monotony, the drabness, the regimented life where he had to bow and scrape before authority and do the same boring tasks day after day after day. If he had been a cartoonist or an illustrator it wouldn’t have been so bad; he could have done