"But what if they are what you say. Then what?" Jasper asked.

Silk winced. "You want a girl, don't you? Ever hear of sex?" Then Silk smiled. "I know. You got to have the lights low, soft music on the phonograph, and the shutters closed. Then you'll do it. Right?"

Jasper nooded in quick agreement. Yes, that's the way it would be, he thought. He wrote the letter to Bill several times until the language was deliberate and unemotional but polite because Bill had been writing him two and three times a week for about a year. Jasper let his mind touch the idea, before withdrawing from it, that he enjoyed, just a little, this power of rejection he had over Bill, but he kept his letter factual and distant, and ended it with the careful statement, "I can only conclude that you have ulterior motives and that our relationship is not a healthy one, and should not be continued." That sounded literary and after he had mailed it, the ring of the words echoed in his ears. He was glad to have chopped off the correspondence as cleanly as he had. It made him feel that, at last, he was beginning to act as a straightforward adult-like Bob Silk.

But when he told Silk what he had written, Silk laughed, and made it all seem trivial. He was going to town and that was all that seemed important. But anyway, Silk approved. Still, Jasper was disappointed when Silk made no further mention of the hurdle he had crossed. After all, Bill had been a friend. But Silk only got out a clean shirt from his foot locker. Jasper watched him put on his civilian shorts that Silk liked. They were cut up the side like running shorts. These he always wore for one of his girls.

Then, "So long, kid," Silk said and left.

Jasper wished he had not said, “Kid.”

Jasper watched the mails for a week or two for the usual letters from Bill, and had already rehearsed the disgust he would feel at Bill's futile amends, but no letter came. After the Friday mail call, he went over to the USO and watched Jack Marsh dance. He had already run into George and Ed a couple of times and passed them by. He had dreaded meeting them but he found it was easy to censor them when he did. He was relieved to have avoided becoming, as he saw them among the others, now, strange and even proud of being strange.

To keep on the right path, Jasper tried to be more friendly with Jack Marsh but Jack gave him a look that went through him like two bayonets. That hurt because everybody liked Jack Marsh and wanted to be in his platoon. Even George and Ed who were usually pretty critical accepted Jack Marsh, or Jack Marsh accepted them.

It's not easy getting a new group of friends, Jasper thought, but anyway, he was rid of the doubt he felt in himself. He did have some "homosexual tendencies" but then all his own family were slow in growing up, somehow, and that phase of hero-worship he saw in himself was only a phase. Silk was right. The lights and everything had to be right. But first, he had to find a girl.

Across the dance floor he saw Jack Marsh and his date jitterbugging. Jasper couldn't dance that well. He looked at the girls who had come in from town and sat on the sidelines, waiting, demanding, but pretending to ignore what they had come for. He wouldn't break into the clusters that were talking to each other. But Jasper caught the eye of one brunette, standing alone. Her face was cold. How could she understand? Another girl chewed gum. And her companion looked too eager. The rest were fat. Or dumb. He turned to a girl in a pink angora sweater, standing next to him.

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