The outside world came back to her with the voices of children on the street below. She looked at the alarm clock on Erika's dresser. It was five minutes past twelve.

She didn't want to go back to her own room, scene of so many defeats. If I can stay here I'll be all right, she thought confusedly. She found bread on Erika's food shelf and spread it with jelly from a forgotten jar, tough and sugary but still good. And went back to the chair, holding her sandwich carefully away from the book.

She had read books like these before. Had watched the girls on the street, the obvious ones with short haircuts and heavy loafers, sometimes dressed in blue jeans and heavy jackets. People laughed at them or, worse, felt sorry. At the same time she read all she could find about girls like these, conscious of a quickening of awareness when she found some reference to the matter in a magazine. It was a world along whose borders she had walked for a long time, without ever really finding a gate that opened in.

She had shared the apartment with Connie for four months, striking up the kind of almost-friend-ship girls form when they work in the same office. They agreed to double up for a while until they could find something better or make closer friendships. Away from the office, Connie was affectionate, always hanging around her neck, dressing and undressing in a sort of flirtatious self-consciousness. After the first week or so, she began to look forward to the evenings when they would be together, when she could feel Connie's arms around her in the goodnight hug. What more she wanted she wasn't sure. She remembered the typist in her office, a young wife expecting her first baby, who had asked in honest wonder, "But what do they do?"

She put down Erika's book, remembering.

Then came the night when she got into Connie's bed and started to explore the lush curves of that ripe body. Connie had been icy with shock and anger. Kate had been the latest in a series of schoolgirl crushes, nothing more. Connie would hug and kiss her; borrow small sums of money that she forgot to pay back; make excuses to get out of washing the dishes, and that was it. Even that much intimacy ended in a hurry when Kate, empty and scared, went on a three day binge that ended in losing her job.

She knew there were women committed—cheerfully enough, it seemed—to the way of life she had never dared explore. Their offbeat affairs were accepted by their own kind and even by other people who regarded themselves as sophisticated. She supposed there must be others, in small towns, on college campuses, everywhere. She had wondered if she might even be one of them—but then you would know, surely?

Since the astonishing things that had happened to her in Erika's arms, last night, she wasn't sure.