by

Geoffrey Wright

max ne

JIIIL

In childhood Elsa had been an enigma to her family a silent, pensive, unoffending little creature, seldom moved by amusements to laughter, or by scoldings to tears. During adolescence she kept a plain, colorless, childlike appearance, and even at twenty her round blue eyes and round expressionless face had acquired none of the delineaments of maturity. Through school she was obedient to her elders and a facile student; yet at her core she remained wooden and unresponsive both to men and towards her own sex.

Now passing forty, she had spent her years in what was, in all essential respects, a neuter, genderless life. Her sex had been no more to her than a thing of monthly discomfort and annoyance, unmoved by any of the hungry yearnings of lips and arms, of breasts, thighs and vitals, which perennially stir mature womanhood. Her current acquaintances thought of her as harmlessly strange a remote, prematurely-aged spinster living alone with her two cats and her eight canaries. Her physician regarded her as frigid, though Elsa was the last patient he would have thought of counselling on such a problem. Her employers considered her the evenest, most efficient secretary they had known, her co-workers as the most distant person they had ever met. All this is necessary to know, in order to understand the cataclysm in Elsa's life, which overtook her in the shape of a woman named Maxene.

It began one Monday morning in early summer, after she had entered the elevator of the State Building. So long had she worked there in the employ of the State, that she never troubled to call her floor. The elevator operators would say jokingly that the cage would stop by itself at fourteen to let her off, even if no one were at the controls. This morning, she had a female companion in the elevator, whom she scarcely noticed until she heard a low, unfamiliar voice say, "Eighteen . . . please." The voice was slightly husky, with a quality so rich and throaty that Elsa turned involuntarily to look at the speaker. There stood a young woman of perhaps twenty-five, tall, whose slender, bosomy figure created an impression both of softness and strength. Her dress accentuated her trim waist and her erect graceful carriage, and its color was in calculated contrast to the profusion of burnished auburn hair that hung in bold waves to below her shoulders. Her musky perfume filled the elevator as it crept skyward, and she eyed the elevator-boy coquettishly. But Elsa's glance became a stare which finally drew the other's eyes to meet her own. The

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