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I don’t like it: you sound as though you were talking to a whore.”
    “Come off it, honey. You didn’t drag me up here to tell you about love.”
    “You disgust me,” she said.
    “Listen to her! She’s sore.”
    A silence followed that circulated like an aggrieved bird. Clyde said, “You want to hit me, huh? I kind of like you when you’re sore: that’s the kind of girl you are,” which made Grady light in his arms when he lifted and kissed her. “You still want me to say it?” Her head slumped on his shoulder. “Because I will,” he said, fooling his fingers in her hair. “Take off your clothes—and I’ll tell it to you good.”
    In her dressing-room there was a table with a three-waymirror. Grady, unclasping a bracelet chain, could see at the mirror every movement of Clyde’s in the other room. He undressed quickly, leaving his clothes wherever he happened to be; down to his shorts, he lighted a cigarette and stretched himself, the colors of sunset reflecting along his body; then, smiling toward her, he dropped his shorts and stood in the doorway: “You mean that? That I disgust you?” She shook her head slowly; and he said, “You bet you don’t,” while the mirror, jarred by the fall of her chair, shot through the dusk arrows of dazzle.
    It was after twelve, and Peter, lifting his voice above the pulsing of a rumba band, ordered from the bartender another scotch; looking across the dance-floor, infinitesimal and so crowded the dancers were one anonymous bulge, he wondered if Grady was coming back. A half-hour before she had excused herself, presumably for the powder-room; it occurred to him now, however, that perhaps she’d gone home: but why? Simply because he hadn’t applauded when she described, and evasively at that, the glories of romance? She should be grateful he hadn’t told her a few of the things he had a mind to. She was in love; very well, he believed her, though that he must do so exasperated him: still, did shemean to marry whoever-it-was? As to this, he had not dared ask. The possibility she might was insupportable, and his reaction to it had so waked him that after these martinis and uncounted scotches, he felt still painfully sober. For the last five hours he’d known that he was in love with Grady McNeil himself.
    It was curious to him that he had not before come to this conclusion from the evidence at hand. The cloud of sandcastles and friendship signed in blood had been allowed to obscure too much: even so, the evidence of something more intense had always been there, like sediment at the bottom of a cup: it was she, after all, with whom he compared every other girl, it was Grady who touched, amused, understood: over and again she had helped him to pass as a man. And more: part of her he felt was the result of his own tutoring, her elegance and her judgments of taste; the strength of will she so fervently possessed he took no credit for: that, he knew, was much the superior of his own, and indeed, it was her will that frightened him: there was a degree to which he could influence her, after that she would do precisely as she wanted. God knows, he had nothing to offer, not really. It was possible that he never could make love with her, and if he did probably it would dissolve into the laughter, or the tears, of children playing together: passion between them would beremarkable, even ludicrous, yes, he could see that (though he did not see it squarely): and for a moment he despised her.
    But just then, sliding past the entrance rope, she beckoned to him, and he hastened to join her, thinking only, and with an awareness that seemed unique, how lovely she was, with what excellence she dominated over the flashing squadrons of important cockatoos. Her everyway hair was like a rusty chrysanthemum, petals of it loosely falling on her forehead, and her eyes, so startlingly set in her fine unpolished face, caught with wit and green aliveness all atmosphere. It was Peter who had told