But no sooner had she shed her cape copied from Sabina's than she recognized the room, the man, the scene, and the feelings as not belonging to her, not having been selected by her, but as having been borrowed from Sabina's repertoire of stories of adventures.

Lillian was not free of Jay since she had invited him to witness the scene enacted solely to punish his unfaithfulness. She was not free, she was being Sabina, with the kind of man Sabina would have chosen. All the words and gestures prescribed by Sabina in her feverish descriptions, for thus was much experience transmitted by contagion, and Lillian, not yet free, had been more than others predisposed to the contagion by lowered resistance!

She was ashamed, not of the sensual meeting, but for having acted in disguise, and eluded responsibility.

When the stranger asked her for her name she did not say Lillian, but Sabina.

She returned home to shed her cape and her acts, pretending not to know this woman who had spent hours with a stranger.

To put the responsibility on Sabina.

Escape escape escape—into what? Into borrowing the self of Sabina for an hour. She had donned the recklessness of Sabina, borrowed her cape for a shy masquerade, pretending freedom.

The clothes had not fitted very well.

But after a while, would this cease to be a role and did the borrowing reveal Lillian's true desires?

The possibility of being this that she borrowed.

Blindly ashamed of what she termed unfaithfulness (when actually she was still so tied to Jay it was merely within the precincts of their relationship that she could act, with his presence, and therefore unsevered from him), she discarded all the elements of this charade, cape, bracelets, then bathed and dressed in her own Lillian costume and went to the café where she sat beside Sabina who had already accumulated several plates by which the waiter was able to add the number of drinks.

When Jay felt exhausted after hours of painting he went to see Djuna.

He always softened as he thought of Djuna. She was to him more than a woman. It had been difficult at first to see her simply as a woman. His first impression had been an association with Florentine painting, his feeling that no matter what her origin, her experiences, her resemblances to other women, she was for him like a canvas which had been covered first of all with a coating of gold paint, so that whatever one painted over it, this gold on which he had dissertated during one of his early visits to her, was present as it remained present in the Florentine paintings.