RANSVESTIA

danger and expense-the simple fact that it wouldn't do anything for her, that there wasn't anything she could do after the surgery that she couldn't do already since she was living full time. And always I got that, "I wouldn't be real" reply.

Well, I went away and left her in charge of Chevalier. She is a very conscientious person and she said to herself, "This is Virginia's business so I have to run it the way Virginia would." Well, "running" Chevalier was and is much more than just recording payments and filling orders, there is a lot of counselling, advice and general question answering to be done, too. So naturally some of the letters she got were from people who were also talking about surgery. True to her intent she tried to give them the advice that I would have if I'd been there. She knew what I'd say because I'd said it to her often enough, so out of her brain into her fingers went my advice. But un- beknownst to her at the time was the fact that on the way through her brain from her memory to her fingers it went through her conscious- ness and in the process she became convinced of the correctness of what I'd been saying to her for some months. By the time I returned from Europe, she wouldn't have had surgery if it were free.

This illustrates something to all of us. If you are honest, watch yourself objectively next time you are in an argument about some- thing. You won't pay too much attention really to what your opponent is saying because you will be marshalling your own thoughts for the next thing YOU will say. Thus there is a degree of courtesy extended to let the other fellow have his say, but the really important observa- tions are about to be made by you. Right? Thus we are so defensive against other ideas on the one hand and so anxious to project our own on the other fellow, that what he says is never really weighed for its true worth. Mary was defensive everytime I talked with her and she already had the ultimate weapon ready to use-"you don't under- stand, I wouldn't be real"; thus she never really thought much about what I was saying because she already had her mind made up that I didn't understand and, since I didn't, what could I say that would be significant. But when I was no longer present and thus no longer in an adversary relationship, her conscious mind could consider my arguments as they went through on the way to her fingers as advice to someone else. This was a perfect example of something I heard a psychiatrist say at a meeting some years before but which I and you, whoever you are, tend to constantly forget... "you cannot change the mind of a person about a subject in which they have a large

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