It was how he left his body. It was for a minute only. But he felt for a moment that he had become the woman beside him. As she moved around the room in her nightdress, he could feel that he himself was scuttling about in his womanness. He even felt the sensation of breasts. And the soft texture of the things she wore against his skin. What he felt in the night beside him. Was half touched by. For a second he wore round him something shapeless. Still it pleased.

And as he told her of this sensation and saw her pleasure, he knew he had passed some test his mind and body had set him.

The following day he was walking down the road on his own to the newsagent’s and again he felt the sensation of his bosom fall. Then came the faint feeling of being possessed. For a second, phantom skirts blew out a little behind him. He stopped briefly and shook his head. It was Catherine who had taken him over. He was grateful when his own identity was restored, for he had not the courage to sustain that rootless feeling a moment longer. He knew what had happened, he had become Catherine, not really Catherine but some other woman possessed him, some ideal shape had taken him along the road for a few steps. It was generous and terrifying when he stepped into that phantom dress on the street, then no more. Yet he proceeded not impoverished by what he had felt and seen, not caring that this was only a fraction of the great void to be crossed.

“How’s about ya, Jack?” asked the old lady in the newsagent’s as she pressed a tissue to her lips.

“I’m flying,” said Jack.

Slowly, his transformation into Catherine took place. Since he could not win her as himself, he would become everything that she loved in herself. Not that he knew that this transformation was taking place. But often he would catch himself rise off a chair as she did, lift a cigarette in the same manner. He felt his back suddenly straighten like hers. It was just these incidental intimations told him that something was happening over which he had no control.

Whenever he wrote formerly, he had always gone sober to keep his concentration for all the insane imaginings that took place. Now, when he sat by the fire with the day’s work over, a glass of wine at his feet, a glass of wine at hers, he was amazed at the contentment he felt. It all seemed possible. The play took shape according to her themes, her obsessions, and with all her nuances intact. He wrote about her stubbornness in owning and holding on to what was rightly hers.

“Remember,” she said, “that you are not me.”