that were said about you. And none of them concerned your ability quite the contrary, for several of your former professors went to great pains to give you credit for having a good deal of ability. But in every case, there was one conditional statement. Can you guess what it was?"

SO

I just sat there. I can't remember ever feeling quite so defeated, quite destroyed. The events of the past several months were heaped up afresh and now she was telling me that even my former reputation was blighted. I felt like crying. And then she said, "When you consider my problem and consider your own - doesn't that suggest anything?" It was then that my self control broke down completely. I wept.

In spite of the fact that I knew I was making a fool of myself, I couldn't help it. Every joke, every remark, everything that happened to me all through my life came to me then and the flimsy facade I had erected the careful pose of the intellectual, the philosopher who was above and beyond the common life melted. For I had felt all too keenly my kinship and my alienation from my fellow man.

―

Yes, they all came back then the nicknames from childhood, my own father's strange attitude toward me when he was still alive, my uncle's remarks, the hostility of a high school coach the time when one of my high-school teachers had called me into his office for a lec- ture about homosexuality and I, fool, hadn't realized what he was talking about. Then too, there were all the practical jokes (sic) in the locker rooms, the "horseplay" and the fooling around; the time when I had asked a girl to a school dance and she had giggled out loud and told all her friends who also giggled out loud. And so it went. But I had a defense-I thought. I had my mind and I hid behind a bitterly witty screen had been hiding behind it ever since. And it still did no good. I was open to mine enemies. Even my photograph was sufficient to bring a strange woman over a thousand miles - - to offer me masquerading as a woman!

job,

It didn't help then either, that it was she who showed the strength that should have been mine, as she held her arms about me and soothed me. It didn't help either when at last, my vision cleared, I saw her face burning with a strange glow that highlighted her strong features— and even seemed to sweep over me. In a wild, Rabelasian moment, I thought I saw in her face, as she looked at me, the sort of expression one associates with a man looking with desire

7

at a woman.