twice married, aware of her own tendencies, and, like me, unwilling to admit them. Wo grow very close and intimate – I am speaking of confidences rather than physi cal experiences. This woman, too, took the conventional view of my admitted tendencies; sha was not shocked by the fact that I loved her, but attempted to persuade me that this was an adolescent phase which I would soon grow out of. She also gave me (she was a medical student) textbooks on psychology and anatomy, feeling sure that I was, as she said, sufficiently mature to talk myself out of my childish fears of men.

Largely at her insistence, I allowed myself to become intimate with a man. I had expected to feel shame and self-di sgust; to my surprise I found the experience neither painful nor unpleasant; and if there was little romantic satisfaction well, the best psychological advice seemed to regard romantic love as an adolescent and unrealistic dream, anyhow. I felt, to quote the words of the hero of Mary Renault's THE CHARIOTEER, "Once I found out that I could if I put my mind to it, I felt I might become naturalized, so to speak."

One could therefore say I was misled by the very best psychological advice and by "excellent" sex instruction on a college level. Homosexual tendencies, so these excellent authorities informd mo, were simply a passing phase. And since I had discovered that I was quite sapable of having and enjoying physical relations with at that stage of development, physical relati ons with a woman were still a mystery to mo I regarded myself, Q. E. D., as cured of my adolescent propensities.

a man -

Naturally I married. In the part of Texas where I now livo, teen-age marriages are common: marriages of girls fourteen and fifteen are not at all unusual, and the girl who delays marriage until her twenties is the exception rather than the rule. I was nineteen; my husband was more than twenty years my senior. I rogarded this simply as an attempt to find a man who was intellectually my equal or superior; boys of my own age had no interests, I told myself, except in the football team.

My first child was born less than a year after my marriage. I found married life perfectly tolerable, prog-