begins to receive with sparkling conversation the friends and acquaintances who troupe in and out of his house till the following daybreak. The "grand style" is implicit in his every gesture, yet it is elegance without pretense. He is single, but he is seldom alone...

Manvers seems a mature and unusually colorful version of something seen in certain young, unabashed "queens." that gayety from which this life takes its most common but least accurate name. With many, the gayety is too forceda sham-but these are some, and they are often constitutionally single, for whom the life is a "camp," a very good, gay time. So unlike the pathetic ones who so predictably commit suicide in gay novels, and sometimes in real life ...

The tragic types I haven't dwelt on. But the sorriest seem to me those for whom the hunt is deadly serious, but who've passed their prime as hunters without finding even themselves.

Tilly Andrews would fit none of these categories. I knew her back east in 1948-she was sixty and one of those amazing persons who has done everything, known everyone, been everywhere. She became a doctor in in her youth, when that was a rare thing for a woman, was an active suffragette, and once member of a state Senate. She was in Frisco during the quake. She served overseas in the First War, lived in Hawaii. China and various parts of Europe and worked at all sorts of things. She published several novels, books, poems and articles over the years, all received with interest, but building up to no solid reputation. She was the best distance hiker I ever set out with.

I was taking private writing instructions from her-she took on a few students singly. I mentioned homosexuality in a story (she'd already spotted it in me) and we discussed it at length.

one

I asked her why she'd never found a permanent mate.

"A mate for me?" and she roared. "Could you imagine there being two like me? I'm a single old shoe and heaven and earth couldn't find a mate for me.

"A real mate is someone who matches you pretty close, and if I found someone like myself the two of us couldn't stay in the same room twenty minutes. No. I'm not really joking. Mateship means equality, really meshing with another person

maybe the odds were better when I was young, but I was a pretty rare. bird even then. Love is something else, and I've loved more times than I could count. People think you can't really love but once in a lifetime, or at least, only one person at a time. Nonsense! The dimensions of love are limited only by the individuals' capacities. I loved two of my husbands

and I still love my son and his family. I loved the first teacher who ever kindled an intelectual spark in me, and the first girl I ever slept with. I used to find a good husband for each of my lovers, after a year or so, which was noble of me. You see. I could love a simple person, but not live with them long. Yet all those loves are warmly present with me, as memories. And I have current loves: my students. this town, and this whole foolish and wonderful country of oursloves aplenty, but never a mate in my whole life, and I don't feel I've missed it.

"I don't think everyone's capable of true mate ship. It requires a certain naivete. I've had too complex a life, too many sharp edges of fluid opinion about the things that count with us intellectuals, for me to blend prettily with another personality. Our society has the silly and damaging notion, taken from an 11th Century Romantic heresy. that there's something