about her reproductive system before it springs some painful surprises on her, but knowledge of the darker pitfalls of sex is still reserved for those over 21 by which tim it is too late.

-

To return to myself. At first I insisted I had only a writer's interest, a strictly literary and psychologi cal interest, in the se deviations. Gradually I was forced to admit that my interest was personal; I had once had homosexual tendencies. That I still had them I resolutely refused to admit. I was a mature woman who had grow out of them. I was happily married; or, if not happily, at least the friction in my marriage arose out of the vast age difference between my husband and me and had nothing to do with my past childish aberrations.

My fool's paradise came to an abrupt end when a little girl of fifteen, one of my music pupils, with whom I had the most innocent friendship possible, suddenly married. (Marriages at fifteen, as I say, are common here.) I was outraged and furious, telling myself that this was merely righteous indignation at allowing a girl not yet out of high school to marry and be forced to take on the responsibilities of a home.

I gave the little thing a lovely wedding present, kissed the bride lovingly and the husband politely, promised to bo godmother to her first child, and went home orying no harder than I usually did at weddings. The trouble was,

I didn't stop. I cried incessantly and continuously for the next four months until my husband, thoroughly alarmed, sent me to the doctor for an overdue checkup. His wollmeant ministrations were limited to a prescription for tranquilizers, a friendly pat on the arm, a suggestion that a marriage betwe on a man in his late fifties and a woman in her middle twenties might well be frustrating (even he could realize that I was not happy), and another suggestion that I talk over what was bothering me with a priest or with a woman friend.

Since I was not sure what was bothering me, I sat down to try to figure it out and came up with the most terrifying answer possible, the answer which mde it impossible to talk it over with priest or woman friend, and which collapsed my comfortable card-house into a litter

୨