Mavis came out, looking oddly thoughtful.

"Sorry," I lied, "That took much longer than I'd expected." "Oh-uhThat's quite all right," She muttered, her eyes far away, "Quite -umall right."

look.

"Well, what do you think?" I asked, "Can we do business?" Her eyes cleared suddenly, and she gave me a rather strange

"I think we can," She replied, with just a hint of a smile,

"Just let me check out some things with my Group. Shall we get togeth on this again next week?"

"Sure," I replied, "There's no hurry. It's the middle of winter after all, and I'm not anxious to get out until the weather's warm enough for swimm-uh, for hiking and stuff."

Once she had left, I congratulated myself on a job well done. She was hooked, no doubt about it! Feeling highly self-satisfied, I went into my den for another look at my private videotapes. I found that I must have left my favorite tape in the machine without remembering, because it was all loaded up and about twenty minutes into the running time. Well, no wonder I was getting forgetful with all I had on my mind! Smiling, I sat down to watch highlights of embarassed women in scenes from old movies.

A week later, Mavis dropped a bombshell of her own. "I'm afraid," She announced, "That the only way I can get you onto one of my Camping Expeditions is if you disguise yourself as a woman!"

She must have seen the look of total disbelief in my eyes, for she went on,

"I know it sounds perfectly outrageous at first blush, but if you stop and think, I believe it might be quite suitable. Consider: "I have spoken to the women in my group, and they absolutely refuse to have a man along on an overnight camping trip. All of us are Feminists, and I'm afraid there are a couple of genuine manhaters in the crowd; perhaps even a few lesbians, I shouldn't wonder. At any rate, with all that stacked up against you, there is simply no way you could accompany us as a male.

"However, disguised as a female, not only would you fit in perfectly, but also, you would gain the benefit of seeing camping first-hand from the feminine point of view. I've given the matter some consideration, particularly remembering how convincing you looked in female attire at that costume party, and I believe it can be done if you're willing. Otherwise, I'm afraid we shall have to forgo the outing and the publication altogether."

For a moment I groped for the right words to convey to this avant-garde englishwoman how totally impossible this idea of hers was. She sat across from me, totally calm and unflappable as I tried to explain.

"In the first place," I said, "If your regular group doesn't want to go hiking with a man, why don't you just find some other girls we can go with? Because in the second place, a Party is one thing, but I am not about to go out in public dressed up as a woman, because and this is most important in the third place there is no way I could disguise myself convincingly enough to fool a group of girls out in the wild like that, without makeup, hairstyling, padded outfits and the rest of it. Can't you see how impossible it would be?"

"Firstly," She countered, "The whole point of my book, as you should know, is how well women can work as a team in the outof-doors. My group is my team, and I simply couldn't give you a reasonable demonstration of my principles without them. Secondly, I don't think you're so insecure as to feel that your masculinity would be threatened by wearing khaki camping togs that happened to have been designed for a woman. Thirdly and I quite agree with you that this is the most important aspect of the whole affair I have done some research into the matter, and I believe that you can be made into a completely convincing woman even without costuming and makeup, if you're willing to undergo some quite temporary changes. At any rate, if you at least try it and then decide to back out, we can always make other arrangements. After all, it's late November now, and we can't expect any appropriate weather until Spring, so that should give you sufficient time to decide. Are you game?"

"Well...." I started mustering up my arguments against it. "Oh please, at least give it a try," Mavis urged, "It's so important to get women into this area! And I'm afraid that even more women will need persuading once the story of those unfortunate girlsgets out."

"What girls?" I asked.

——

"Hadn't you heard? I thought it must have been in all the tabloids by now. Well it was all their own fault, and they could have had much worse befall them, I suppose. At any rate, it seems these two young girls of about Twenty went on a camping trip and once they'd pitched camp and done some swimming skinny-dipping, you know they decided to climb up to a nearby rock and sunbathe, so they just marched up there in the nude. Well, it was farther of than they'd thought, or perhaps it was a tricky route they took, but the upshot was that after they'd been up there naked as jaybirds for about an hour, and it was getting on towarss sunset, they went to climb down again and lost their way! Can you imagine? The two of them lost in the woods at dark, completely nude!"

"What happened?" I tried to conceal my excitement, grateful for the desk-top that concealed the bulge in my trousers.

"I guess they spent a rather uncomfortable night huddled together under some fallen leaves for warmth, then set off the next morning in an entirely wrong direction and wandered onto the grounds of the Girls State Reform School, where they were mistaken for inmates! Both girls were rather young-looking, you see, and of course, quite aside from being naked, they hadn't a scrap of identification between