N

"Plunge right in, Plum, he murmured.

week. You might as well be comfortable."

"You're in this for a His first selection was

a blue linen jumper which he slipped over a rather sterile white blouse. The fit wasn't bad but the excess fabric bunched up in the place which breasts would normally have filled, looked quite out of place. He knew he would have to wear a padded brassiere to make anything fit correctly. It took a moment to get used to the idea but he accepted it as he had accepted the necessity for wearing panties (even though he tried not to think about it). This done, however, he discovered what fashionable women have always known-- that the cotton blouse and the jumper drawn tightly over the lace and satin mounds was just too girlish to be borne. "I am nothing," Mr. Plum said to the mirror, "if not mature. The blouse went and the jumper with it.

"1

The next selection, a sleeveless and pleated dinner dress, left him feeling like a complex of bare angles. It was not his dress. But he grew more expert as he passed down the rows of shap- ed satins and pleated silks and finally, although it took several hours, he felt well done up in a peach taffeta skirt topped by a long sleeved white silk blouse. As he viewed himself in the mirror he noticed that though the body was surprisingly graceful and att- ractive, the face was still the sorrowing maze of lines that he knew so well. The solution to that problem was so obvious that Mr. Plum's hand hesitated only a little as he reached for a lipstick. When he had finished the rather inexpert job of makeup he draped a scarf about his head and critically viewing himself in the mirror said, "Making the best of a bad thing isn't bad by half, if I do say so myself."

On the second day, with a resolution that came from being re- signed to his fate (at least this is where Mr. Plum self-conscious- ly imagined the resolution to come from) he changed dresses several times and he spent the whole evening in a pink satin cocktail sheath. It did wonders for his eyes. He had to cinch himself quite tight-

ly into an all-in-one to make the dress fit. As he moved he felt the cool satin grip his ribs and his stomach in an unyielding but friendly clasp. He became used to spike heels in twenty minutes or so and he shaved his legs without ever pausing to consider where the decision to do so had come from. The thing that most surprised Mr. Plum was the suaden realization of what it meant to be really "dressed up".

22.