to your childhood when you played hide-and-seek?"), they got lost, driving slowly over narrow roads and wooded hills that Sue found charming.

They finally stumbled onto the place. An old high adobe wall and wild sugar bushes and trunks of towering eucalyptus trees hid the secluded house from the street. The path to the gate was a cushiony and rustling carpet of eucalyptus leaves, and the air was sharp with their oily scent.

Through the gate, they were greeted by the two men hosts in the large walled patio, and in the midst of introductions she saw the fuchsias and caught her breath.

From an ancient olive tree, they hung in baskets and spilled out and down in an unbelievably thick and lush dark green against which stood out the fat blossoms in a color riot of purples, reds, white and blues. Even in the commercial fuchsia gardens she had never seen their equal.

"Gawd!" she moaned, "Gawd in the morning!"

She went to them and, one by one, lifted up the blossoms, tenderly, and in awe, as with a woman's breasts.

Suddenly she heard repeated, quizzically, at her side, in a feminine and heavily accented voice, "Gott in zee morning?" and she turned and found herself facing a young very blond woman with the bluest eyes she had ever seen. "Esz zat a ko-lok-ko-loke-oh phooey-I remember zee ism at zee end but—” "Colloquialism?"

"Yes! Before next Wednesday, eet eez necessary zat I have feefty for my English teacher, and I have twenty only," and she whipped from a pocket of her slacks a pad and pencil.

"Well, I'm not sure that's one, just something we used to say back in Texas. I'm Sue," she smiled, offering her hand.

"I'm Trudi. Ooooh, Texas! Zat is zee soud, and my teacher says zat eez zee most colorful and weeth zee best writers, Faulkner, Styron, you know zem?" "I'm afraid," Sue laughed and in the instant that Trudi's intense eyes left her face to jot something down, Sue swiftly stole a look at the figure, from that beautiful hollow at the base of the brown neck, to the young jutting breasts of which she had been achingly aware, to the small waist and hips-"that I'm one of the uneducated Texas slobs."

"Slob?"

"Oh, that's like a nitwit or a nincompoop."

"Wait!" laughed Trudi, writing furiously. "Honey," she called, "I have found me gold-no-a piece of gold-no-oh phooey-"

"You have evidently," smiled a heavy blond older woman coming over and placing an arm around Trudi, "found a gold mine. Hello. I'm Chris."

"Sue. Hi." She forced a smile and bitterly thought, gawdammit, they're always already married and taken.

As usual when she'd been disappointed, Sue lit into the cocktails with a vengeance, knowing she shouldn't and enjoying them all the more.

While chatting with the two hosts, she found, to her horror, herself trance-like staring at Trudi, drinking in her beauty.

Abruptly she turned her back. She loathed people who flirted with married. people.

"Ah, yes, that loverly Sears Roebuck catalogue," Willie-Poo was, unaccountably, exclaiming languidly. "When I was a kid on the farm, it saved me from going mad, I do believe, with that loverly men's underwear section in each one. And each year when the new catalogue came out, mama would

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