then returned, sat down. No use combing the biographical stuff again, she knew every sentence in print by heart long since, and it came to dammed little more than this obituary. Nor need one expect much in addition even now Lynn Currier was gone. Not about a woman unmarried at firty-three, teacher of phys. ed., with those two queer books to her credit.

Lcrdy, the fover of that first wild futile hunt to learn about her, after finding Cuicksands! And the desperate secrecy of the hunt. Just as one had out olasses and rushed the whole way downtown to buy the book in a store where one wasn't known. And read it in a single afternoon, and finished blind drunk on no more than discovering at last that one other person completely understood...

Why didn't I write her then? Again a kind of choking panic. Now I never can. .......Always going to someday, when I found the time and courage enough to say what had to be said. ...Always seemed there was all the time in the world for it. A sort of treat, saved for the future. And now you never will.

-

And

Her aching throat closed, her eyes burned dangerously. there were still lunch and four working hours to get through. A fine thing if Old Agate began weeping here in her new fishbowl. Sho mapped erect and rang down all her inner asbestos ourtains. Let the young half-bakes twitter their warnings: Old Ag's blowing up a storm...

Going home she bought a fifth of Seagram's 7-Crown. So much for Dr. Eleanor's calamity howling. (Hell, men, do you want to live forever?") Food was of no more interest than at noon. She spread camembert on a rye orisp or two. Those and the scotch syphon and ice at her right elbow. A frosh pack and the nine-inch ashtray at her loft. Then she reached down Quicksands from her shelves, and settled.

At the touch of the now softened shabby covers she shivered. Uncanny to become so utterly again the girl who first read it – her first queer book. Stumbling on that review by acoident, running crazy with excitement, making the wild dash to buy it, going the reakless length of lunch at the University Women's Club so she could at unnoticed in the

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