31.

smoothly painted face. His full and deeply red lips were in excellent contrast to his luminous dark eyes. They were both amazed at his face. He had become a patrician and Mediterranean beauty with a richly sensuous voice.

The costume for the girl Santa Claus was altered to Nancy's specifications. It was of deep red satin, slimly out and trimmed in fluffy white fur. The ski pants fitted narrowly into sleek little boots. The jacket fastened with little bells and had mittens and a hood, both impossibly feminine, fastened to it. The total outfit conveyed the impression of femininity in a Christ- mas motif rather than the other way around and looked like the December leaf of those calendars which used to hang in incon- gruous splendor in the office of an ice and coal jobber or a coun- try feed store. Nancy Morgan was quite proud of her achievement. The afternoon snow fell heavily on Christmas eve and Jack stood at the window peering out at the white whirling day and nervously running his gleaming red nails through the fur at his ouffs. A dim reflection looked back at him through the window smiling and receeding by turns. She beckoned him, a dark and el- aborately painted seductress with ebony smooth hair framed in white fur. An inner voice spoke words but dimly distinguished from the wind's sudden howl. "So", the reflected girl seemed to say, "this is what you're really like? No wonder you stayed in lingerie so long, but then--we knew it all the time, DIDN'T we?" The figure smirked prettily and disappeared in the snow.

Jack turned from the window feeling the smooth pressure of the bra and girdle as they gently pulled at his skin. Nancy en- tered the room drawing on her long kid gloves. She looked at Jack critically. "You make a lovely Santa", she said.

Jack felt the quick coloring of his cheeks beneath her cold and familiar stare of appraisal. But he did not glance nervously away as he had so often in the past. He wet his lips and delib- erately, in an idle and distinctly feminine fashion, fluffed the hair along his neck. "Am I really beautiful?" he asked in a throaty contralto.

It was Nancy Morgan's turn to better go", she said. "That store party! Did I forget anything ?"

redden, and look away. "We'd will be a madhouse....and the