What Donald had achieved by capturing her into his net of fantasy as the firebird (while in the absence of erotic climate he had subtly dulled her plumage) was not only to reach his own need's fulfillment but to enable her to rejoin her mother's image which was her image of goodness: her mother, dispenser of food, of solace—soft warm and fecund.

On the stained mirror stood the shadow and echo of her mother, carrying food. Wearing the neutral-toned clothes of self-effacement, the faded garments of self-sacrifice, the external uniform of goodness.

In this realm, her mother's realm, she had found a moment's surcease from guilt.

Now she knew what she must say to Donald to cure his sense of smallness, and the smallness of what he had given her. She would say to him:

"Donald! Donald! You did give me something no one else could give me, you gave me my innocence! You helped me to find again the way to gain peace which I had learned as a child. When I was a child, only a little younger than you are now, after days of drugging myself with reading, with playing, with fantasies about people, with passionate friendships, with days spent hiding from my parents, with escapes, and all the activities which were termed bad, I found that by helping my mother, by cooking, mending, cleaning, scrubbing, and doing all the chores I most hated, I could appease this hungry and tyrannical conscience. It's no crime that you have remained a child, Donald. In some of the old fairy tales, you know, many mature characters were shrunk back into midgets, as Alice was made small again to re-experience her childhood. It's the rest of us who are pretenders; we all pretend to be large and strong. You just are not able to pretend."

When she entered his room, she found a letter on her table.

Once she had said to him, when his moods had been too contradictory: "Adolescence is like cactus," and he had answered: "I'll write you a letter some day, with cactus milk!"

And here it was!