very confident of myself, despite my total lack of experience, I tenta- tively reached an arm out for her, under the sheet. She shuddered at my touch, but didn't pull away and I began to slowly and methodically massage her back. She settled down then, and emboldened I slid a hand around in front of her. She offered only a token resistance and I was beginning, in mad fantasy to feature myself as a super Don Juan, when I went too far. Too far indeed. Better it had been had I slept on the couch. Better if I had not come here - - better if I had never seen this strange, strange girl. For allowing my hand to drift casually and insistently along her stomach, I had discovered that beneath her underpants Beth was built the same as I!

Night. The feral time, when the hunted and hunter act out their unending tragedy. Or is it comedy? Are we men therefore only the idle playthings of a whimsical monkey-god who plays with men like boys play with flies. Like Lear, I felt on the verge of madness.

―

My poor companion however, was dredging up sobs from the very bottom of existence. She and I could think of her no other way lay their inert, limply, like a doll who has been trampled underfoot. The sexual attraction I had felt had vanished, replaced by sympathy, really. All the questions I had asked myself about her in the past few days were answered, and the biggest one of all was being answered now by her grief. The question of whether she was attracted to me as a boy or girl was purely academic- rather stupid, in fact. And sheer madness to contemplate. For my part now, I had to offer to her my sympathy and understanding in hopes it would comfort her.

I held her in my arms, comforting her as one would a child a beauti- ful child of no particular gender. And childlike, she seemed innocent there, innocent of the ugliness one would normally associate with such circumstances, as if she were more sinned against than sinning. At length she grew silent.

"Thank you," she murmured at last. "It's been so long since anyone held me that way." After a few moments, she began to tell me her life story, a story as fascinatingly horrible as anything Poe ever conceived, with a weird Gothic beauty that played around the edges. Beauty that was the key to the story and its compensation.

Beth born Bernard, the only child of a Polish immigrant family whose father had worked for all the years he had been in the country for